Charlie|18|England

hobbit(s)

GIF Tutorial  

Obviously people make gifs in different ways, and if you don’t like this way then there’s plenty of other tutorials out there, but this is how I personally make mine. I use VLC Media Player (it’s kind of rubbish, I advise you download Cyberlink PowerDVD 11 which works in the same way but my free trial ran out and I can’t find a torrent link) and Photoshop CS4. I don’t have download links but if you google them they’re pretty easy to find.

If you already have a way of screencapping videos or are importing them through File, Import, Video Frames to Layers, skip straight to STEP EIGHT.

STEP ONE:

Download and install Photoshop and VLC Media Player or Cyberlink PowerDVD. 

STEP TWO: 

If you’re using Cyberlink, skip to the next step, if you’re using VLC, you need to do this first. Go to Tools, then Preferences, then to Hotkeys, and go down to the action called Next Frame. Change the hotkey to whatever button you want to use (I use t for it).

Then go down to the action called Take Video Snapshot and change the hotkey to whatever (I use c). 

STEP THREE:

Go to Tools, Preferences, Video, and then scroll down to the place that says Video Snapshots. In Directory, choose the folder where you want to save your screenshots to. You can just make a folder called ‘GIF screenshots’ or something (I just use my old PowerDVD one). Make sure the format is set to ‘.jpg’.

If you’re using PowerDVD this migth be in a slightly different place, so just hunt around for it.

STEP FOUR:

Insert a DVD/download a video off the internet/off youtube. You can use sites like keepvid to do this.

STEP FIVE: 

Find the place in the DVD which you want to make a gif of, and pause it there. Then, press c to take a screenshot of that, t to move forward a frame, and then repeat this until you have capped the entire section you want to gif. I realise I do this a really long winded way, but it’s just the way I prefer making gifs. Altogether you should have between about thirty to a hundred caps, but we can cut this number down once we get to Photoshop.

STEP SIX: 

Go to this website and click on the ‘Download for: Photoshop CS2+’ button (doesn’t work in Chrome, I don’t know why). Then, copy it from your Downloads folder into the ‘Adobe Photoshop CS#/Presets/Scripts’ section of your Photoshop.

STEP SEVEN: 

Next, open up your Photoshop. If you’ve copied it correctly, when you go to File and then Scripts, there should be an option called ‘Import Folders as Layers 2-0-0’. 

Open this and select the folder which you set as your folder to save your screenshots to.

 

STEP EIGHT: 

Now is when we get onto actually making the gif. Once all of the screenshots have imported, you want to first go to Image, Image Size…, make sure ‘Constrain Proportions’ is ticked, and then change the width to 600.

Then you want to click the button in the bottom right hand corner and select the button with the arrow and the three little lines,

And then click ‘Make Frames from Layers’.

This should put all of your Layers on the right into the Animation (Frames) bar at the bottom (if you can’t see them just double click the ‘Animation (Frames)’ and they’ll appear).

STEP NINE:

Now you can crop away any edges you don’t need, like if the main image is in the center and there’s loads of nothing on the side which you can get rid of. Once you’ve cut off as much as you want, go again to Image, Image Size…, and change the width to 500.

STEP TEN:

Now, do whatever colouring and whatnot you want to do. If you don’t really know what’s going on, I have a couple of PSDs here. If you don’t get how to use them, ask me in my ask box or something, because that’s pretty simple.

STEP ELEVEN:

Select all the frames in ‘Animation (Frames)’, and click on the first one where it says ‘0 sec’, and change it to ‘0.1 sec’.

STEP TWELVE:

Now your gif is ready for saving. You want to go File, and then Save for Web and Devices… Once you’re there, select from ‘Preset:’ the option called ‘GIF 128 Dithered’. 

Have a look in the bottom left corner. If the file size is bigger than 500k it won’t work on Tumblr (just warning, this gets real annoying). 

If it’s up to about 700k then you can fiddle with stuff, but because this one is way bigger, I’ll show you what you can do to make it a lot smaller first. If yours is only a little bigger, skip to step fourteen, and if yours is under 500k already skip to step fifteen.

STEP THIRTEEN:

So if you have a stupidly large gif like mine is at the moment, it’s probably because you have way too many frames. Mine has 25 at the moment, so a really good way to make a gif a lot smaller is deleting every other frame, and then increasing the time. You want to select every other frame and then delete them.

When you’ve done this, select all the layers like you did in step eleven and then change the ‘0.1 sec’ to ‘0.2 sec’.

STEP FOURTEEN:

Go to File, and then Save for Web and Devices… and select from ‘Preset:’ the option called ‘GIF 128 Dithered’ again. You can see how the size has shrunk a lot.

Now there are a few ways you can make it under 500k. First off, you can shrink the actual image dimensions, but I usually avoid doing this because I think it looks kinda ugly, but it can be useful for some things. You want to just change the number here until it’s under 500k.

If you don’t want to do that, another way of making it a lot smaller is by going Image, Adjustments, and Black and White… which you know, is pretty self explanatory.

If you don’t want to do either of these, then you want to make sure ‘Dither’ is on at least 90%, click the top right hand button, change ‘Desired File Size’ to 500k, and click ‘OK’.

If you think it looks too pixelated, click where it says ‘Diffusion’ and change it to ‘Pattern’.

This will probably put it over 500k again, so just do the ‘Optimize to File Size’ thing again, and then see if you prefer it like that.

STEP FIFTEEN:

Your gif is ready! Now, just save it and then upload it to Tumblr! Here is the gif we have made!

Dean likes his food! Right, I’m sorry that was so long and I hope you made sense of it all! If you have any more questions, feel free to ask me and I’ll get back to you in your ask box or whatever, and if this tutorial actually helped you, if you could let me know that would be great, because I’d like to know if this has helped people out!