How to Apply Photoshop Action to GIFs
Chat, you know when you make gifs for your stories or edits and you think 'damn, this looks kinda blah but idk what can I do about it'?
Well think no more because I'm gonna show yall how to make gifs pretty*.
*well, give a nice leaping point ^^
Photoshop (I'm using 24.3.0 -- the last version before they put all that AI shit in it. I'm giving the version number just in case you want to go 🔍 but any version should do.)
I'm assuming that you already know how to capture video and convert it to a gif... but if you don't, ezgif is gonna be your best friend. (We'll get to this step at the end, dw.)
Go to the Windows tab and scroll all the way down to Timeline. This is where your vid will be.
2. Load your vid and your screen will look like this. Your video is a layer. Click on the hamburger menu (where the yellow arrow is), go to Convert Frames and select Flatten Frames into Clips.
3. Without touching the timeline, go back to the same option and select Make Frames from Clips.
4. Now you have a bunch of frames. You can also see them as Layers. But the important thing -- see that yellow arrow? Move the blue scrub thingie (idk what it's actually called) and the gray adjuster thing to there. Why? Because the very first frame of the video is blank and it will make the gif blink for just that frame. Highly annoying.
5. Now, it's time to cut some frames. Remember -- we're gonna apply an action to it and that increases the gif size. We're still working with 10MB (more like 9.5mb but I digress.) For this particular one, I'm gonna shorten it down to 70 frames. The fastest way to do this is through Layers -- select the very last frame and then scroll down to your desired frame, then Shift to select all of them in between the last frame and where you stopped, then Delete.
6. Your timeline will be shortened to the new last frame as shown both the layer view and timeline view.
7. Now go back to the last frame and use an action*. The action(s) will be in the Timeline view like this. (Note: I'm not sure why some actions work and some won't but I don't know PS on that type of level.)
8. Make sure the right gray adjuster is on the last frame. Now that we got our frames action-fied, we can put it all together into a gif. Back to Convert Frames but this time click on Convert to Frame Animation. It'll give you a caution window but click on Continue anyway.
9. Alright! Looking more like a gif frame break down. You can see your gif in action if you hit the play button but also to make sure you don't have any blanks. If you do have a blank, you can delete the frame.
11. (optional?) I don't mess with this bc I don't know what it is so I just say "Okay."
Now! We're partially done. We gotta check to see if the gif is under 10MB. If it is, you're gucci; you're done! Post that thang.
If it's not... remember I said EZGif is gonna be your friend? EZGIF is a free (FREE!!) site that does a lot of things, converting, optimizing, name it, it probably does it. This is the part I leave to you since everything is p much self explanatory and there's a LOT of options.
Don't make the video too long. 2 maybe 3 seconds tops.
For the sake of this tutorial, I cut it down to 70 frames to give an idea what to do; you may have to cut more frames to say 40ish. That seems to be the magic number in terms of going to ezgif to compress it down to less than 10mb without too much quality loss.
As stated above, some actions may work and some may not and I have no idea why that is...
I suggest one action to try and keep the (initial) file size. I actually did two ^^;;
But here is how to use actions on gifs! Go make some! :D
stormborns
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