race like you flirt

1: Getting the video -> one of the most tedious parts if i may say so myself is getting the vid. But there is two main things i use. The first one is for youtube videos: 4kdownloader. I've tried them all. The online ones, the none online ones. But this one is the best. And for free up to 10 downloads a day! You can download in any quality you want it is very fast.

Another program I use is obs. This is basically the program for streamers, but it screen records too, in perfect quality! With firefox you can screenrecord EVERYTHING, from netflix to espn to hbo. I marked with a red rectangle my settings that I recommend!

Because torrent is another beast, I will not cover it here. But for movies and tv shows I torrent them and then cut clips with an app called bandicut

Once you have your video you need to import it to photoshop. There are basically two options for this. a) FILE -> IMPORT -> VIDEO FRAMES TO LAYERS

One good thing about this mode is that you can delete some duplicated layers and make the gif smoother. But, there is a limit of the amount of frames it can convert. Once you have it open like this, you need to change the velocity of each layer by selecting them all and changing the 0,02 to 0,05

Now, I proceed with cropping the gif. The width that works for tumblr is 540px. For gifs side by side it's 268px. And for three gifs side by side it is 178px. The height doesn't matter, that is your choice, how you like the ratio. My standard is 540x400. Last part of this section is converting all the layers into a smart object which store image data preserving the original and allowing you to modify it without permanently altering it. To do this you need to select all the layers in the layer window on the side, right click on them and select "Convert to Smart Object".

b) FILE -> OPEN

This option is faster. I personally use this option also because there is literally no limit of how long the clip can be (although. the shorter the clip, the easier the timeline use). Once you have the video imported, you have to, again, change the speed. But in this case, the entire video. You want to make it slower, so with the triangle, you change the 100% speed to 50%, duplicating the duration.

Then, you need to do the cropping, exactly the same as I explained it before. And once you do that, you can convert the video group to smart object.

Things to consider: the size of the gif at the end of it all depends, already, of two things done here. The first one, is the duration of the gif, or, more specifically, the amount of frames. And the second one is the width x height. You need to find the balance. For example, for gifs of 540x400 you usually can't go over 5 seconds or 150 frames (depending on the way you get the video, sometimes 5 seconds is less than 150 frames or way more, that is also why deleting some duplicated frames, especially if you screen record, is an advantage).

2: Sharpening -> possibly the most important part of giffing, in my opinion. The details appear clearer by increasing the contrast where different tones meet. It defines the videos more. For this, my way of doing it is the following one you go to FILTER -> SHARPEN -> SMART SHARPEN and you change the values like this. The one in the top is your base one, and then you duplicate the smart object and change the smart filter to the one at the bottom. On this one, you change the opacity to 50%.

And this is the difference. Of course, this is MY way of doing sharpening, you can always play with the values and find what you like!

One more thing you can add to this step is surface blur, which can help to low quality videos like instagram posts or even twitter posts.

3: Coloring -> this is the fun part. You bring life to the gifs. I mostly use 4 properties for this: a) CURVES: here you adjust points throughout an image’s tonal range. For this I use the sample that sets to a white point and click around om the lighter parts of the gif to see what I like the most (like the gif below in the left). You can also, by changing the "RGB" to the different colors (red, green, blue), adjust some of the main colors around the gif, maybe suppressing the reds if you see there is too much, or the greens, or the blues. Trying to find a balance.

b) EXPOSURE: here you basically play with the contrast you want. The proper exposure is how much lighter you want the gif, you want to move it towards positive numbers. The offset is you target the shadows of the gif, you want to move it towards the negative numbers, but be careful because it can really fuck up the colors, especially black individuals. Then you have the gamma correction that helps balance a bit the colors that were affected, mostly by the offset, you want to move it to the positive numbers. What I usually do with the exposure layer is change the blending mode to luminosity, especially when working with clips where the coloring makes them turn a bit orange/red.

c) Selective color: what this does is literally change the way a color shows on the gif. In all gifs, I always change the color black, adding more to it like shown below, to darken the black parts which helps a bit with quality AND makes the gif a bit smaller bc it makes less shades of black (less colors=less heavy). Another thing I tend to use selective color on is trying to correct some oversaturation of skins (especially on people of color). Usually tweaking red and yellow, but being careful. One more thing I sometimes like to do is intensify some colors like blue or green. But it is always try and error.

d) Hue/Saturation: this i use for two things. The first one, make lips redder, this is by selecting the Reds and upping the saturation of it. Then with the color range at the bottom i adjust so it only applies to the very red parts of it, because often times red also is found on the skin and we do not want saturation skin. With the hue slider you can also change specific colors you choose. I sometimes use it to tint the lips a bit pinker if I want to. Or even sometimes change completly some colors like turn a blue to a pink or whatever. The second thing I mostly use it for is to desaturate some skins, especially when all the rest didn't work. But being very careful about it.

Extra: my favorite way to make the gifs black and white -> gradient map. There is a black&white effect but I don't like it a lot bc it tooks away some depth of it.

Some extra clarifications: i am by no means an expert in skin color colorings, i try very hard to make it work. and all the tips I learned I took them from this tutorial.

4: Exporting -> final part!!! Here you go to FILE -> EXPORT -> SAVE FOR WEB. And this panel opens. The settings that work for my gifs are the ones below. Especially the "pattern" one is life changing. The matte to none is essential if you want gifs that have a transparent background so it does not turn out white. One important thing also is the colors. Sometimes when gifs are a bit over 10mb you can change the colors from 256 to 200 or even a bit less (not less than 128 I would say, unless you are working with black and white, then you can work with very few colors) so it is less heavy. I try not to do this, but sometimes it's all i can do.