Gif tuts & resources

So you want to learn how to make gifs?

Look no further! This post is a compilation of all tutorials I have written in the past few months, including a few new ones, as well as some useful resources to help you along. The main tutorial will link to all other tutorials that explain certain steps in more detail.

I hope these tutorials help you get started with Photoshop or teach you something you didn’t know before!

Tutorials:

Main gif tutorial: Click here

Everything in detail:

Converting and importing your videos

Photoshop setup for gifmaking

Making and using actions in Photoshop

Making a gif loop

Removing panning on a scene

Timing a gif guidelines

Sharpening a gif

Basic colour theory and pastels

Making a gif under the 3MB limit

How to use save for web

Resources:

Where to download anime: Click here My PSDs: Click here Photoshop actions for gifmaking: Click here

Ask me anything:

Gif tutorial: How to create a clean gif

Ever wonder how those super clean gifs are done? This tutorial covers everything from colouring to save settings to get the most grainless result when making gifs.

Gif tutorial: Save for Web explained and what settings to use

Saving an animated gif in Photoshop, works a bit differently than when you save a regular PNG or JPEG image. You need to go through the “Save for Web” window before you can save it. 

This window comes with many different options and settings, which may appear pretty confusing for first time users or even long term users of Photoshop. 

In this tutorial we’re going to go through what all these settings mean and which settings are best for gifmaking.

After receiving some asked on my personal and fansites about getting reblogged, I’ve decided to share this post on my blog.

So the gif set above is part of one of my Breaking Bad sets located here. I’ve edited and cropped it to show you guys the difference between frame speeds & skipping frames.

All the gifs above are popular frame settings/skipping methods. However, due to many of you using methods featured in gifs 2-8 you’re not getting reblogged by some popular groups/blogs. For example, all the large groups I’m in refuse to reblog gifs that are choppy due to slow frame speeds and/or skip frames. I see some wonderfully colored gifs in my groups blogs, but we won’t reblog them due to how choppy they appear.

The first gif is my actual settings for frame speed and it isn’t skipping any frames. The best frame speeds are between 0.05 - 0.07, anything higher starts to slow the gif down too much and creates a choppy like effect. The 0.05 speed is very close to the actual frame rate we watch our favorite movies and tv shows.

I wrote this up for someone but I figured i’d share it here too, just want to give quick examples of the difference between taking more frames for gifs and taking less frames, so here they are

It’s not that hard really, you just open up your trusty levels

and from there click on the RGB list and go to red

and you’ll see there’s those sliders, all you have to do is move the sliders to go to the wavelengths? whatever the hell those things are

so i moved the white slider to go to the wavelength thing, i didnt have to move the black at all since it’s already touching it. (don’t move the middle slider)

and do that for all the other colours

and ta dah! you’ve brought out colours that otherwise would not have been seen.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

now, the reason why i say no one really does it, is because as you can see from these 2 images, firstly more colours comes into an image, so you’ll naturally get more grain but also if you compare the two images, you can see a lot more banding and the picture gets more low quality because of it (which also gives you more grain and doesn’t look that great if you don’t do it properly)

Surface blur basically cleans out the little noise an img has, which makes the gif cleaner and makes the file size just a bit smaller. the only settings you should be using however when it comes to gifmaking is radius 3 threshold 3 or radius 3 threshold 4. only use threshold 4 if it doesn’t blur out too many details in the image. 

Radius is basically where the blur affects the image, the higher the radius, the wider the blur spread gets, threshold is how much blur it applies to an image, so you can make radius pretty high but if the threshold is really low then it wont do anything drastic but say you had the radius at 3 and threshold at 20 then you’d really be blurring the image way too much.

If by TV shows you mean live action shows then yes you shouldn’t use surface blur for that, it’s not the right type of blur. But surface blur for anime is pretty useful,  for example…

this is without surface blur, as you can see its not bad obviously but you can see grain on her shirt and his hair.. while it might look alright now when you go to save those will make your gif look very textured and it creates more colours in your gif so its harder to get gifs to look clean

this is with surface blur, as you can see her shirt clears up quite a bit and howl’s hair too, even though howl’s hair isn’t fully clean it’s an improvement over the last pic and those extra colours that were on his hair and her shirt have now blended to either 1 colour like her shirt or 2 colours like his hair.

of course this is before the gif is even coloured so you try fix it a bit more with your colouring like this (i just threw any colouring on and tweaked it a bit)

there you go, its much less noticeable now and you can usually get it cleaner if you keep tweaking the colouring. Also when you go to save, since the artefacts aren’t too noticeable photoshop sometimes just takes them out completely because it wants to save some colours for other parts of the gif so theres another bonus to adding surface blur and not to mention it brings the gif filesize down too (sometimes a lot)

Obviously there are times when you won’t need it at all, but most likely when you torrent anime there will always be some sort of banding or artefacts that are hard to remove and thats why surface blur helps a lot when giffing.

Here I saved the gifs with and without surface blur

this is without, not too bad but the grain is quite noticeable in some areas like the face the hair the shirts etc

here it is with blur, the difference is immense, almost everything is much cleaner and all i did was add surface blur filter after sharpening, radius 3 and threshold 4

don’t over-filter, don’t over contrast, don’t over brighten, don’t oversaturate, don’t force colours on certain scenes, don’t keep the same colouring for every gif, don’t over-darken or over-lighten, don’t try make everything in a scene 1 or 2 colours when there’s many more, don’t get rid of skin colour and make them ghosts, don’t grey out all the colours to try get it clean, don’t put a colour tint on your gifs, don’t (try to) use more than 6-7 adjustments (4 adjustments is the sweet spot usually), and finally the last don’t is please please try not to use other people’s psd’s for every single one of your gifs, psd’s only work with certain scenes and certain series and will probably have your gif looking bad than good (believe me most psd’s are terrible)

Here I am at 2am talking about sharpening on anime gifs with about 10 hours sleep, never thought i’d be talking about sharpening like this but alas, i’ve seen 1 too many gifs like this so I thought about bringing it up.

Sharpening, a wonderful tool to help your gifs look nicer. Unfortunately theres literally everyone in the community abusing it. I’m not really sure why people don’t actually notice this issue, or just turn a blind eye to it, but the issue with gif-makers over-sharpening their gifs is quite real. I’d say about 80% anime gifs made nowadays are over-sharpened, at the very least from what i’ve seen going around its about that percentage. So let’s get into it!

Here is a normal anime cap

nothing wrong with it, just a normal cap resized to 540px by 304px, the standard tumblr gif size.

Here is the cap sharpened and surface blur added

looks nice right?, not too sharp, no white halos around the lines and it makes the lines stand out just a little bit. 

Now heres the same cap with the same sharpening and surface blur from the top example, except this one is sharpened a bit differently, I won’t say whats different about the two but the lines stand out more in this cap, overall looks nice and allows the gif to look more pleasant.

This is not what I see on tumblr right now. What I see is sharpening done to the extreme. 

Like this example

this cap right here, is over-sharpened to the max, the lines are so much thicker and edgier and all the little details that really shouldn’t be shown are brought out. This is not how it should look like at all. Sharpening should not be this noticeable on gifs/caps/edits, sharpening is just meant to be a small enhancement to the gif not be the entire gif itself.

Here i’ve pointed out some things to take into consideration when sharpening, look at the highlights and shadows, they actually have gotten solid lines on them from the sharpening, this obviously should not happen, so when you go to sharpen next time look at your shadows and highlights and make sure you don’t make them look like actual lines. Basic tip is just sharpen 150 by 0.3, most of your gifs should look fine with that setting. (But you can obviously fine tune it for every gif)

Last example

right side is obviously the over-sharpened side and left side is the nicely sharpened side, the difference is huge. Left side is so much more natural and smoother while still retaining a bit of sharpening to it which makes it look great. Right side is just a huge mess with shadows and highlights being clearly visible and the whole thing just looks edgier and messier really. 

Sharpening is just an enhancement, like surface blur if you overuse it, it will turn your gifs into shit and make you stand out as a PS noob really. Colouring your gifs nicely is really the only priority most people should have and should try learn better. Sharpening it this much will not help you make better gifs. There’s also the topic of other filters but i’ll leave those for another day.

P.S I’ve done it before too so don’t feel too down if your only noticing your sharpening now, i’ve had to spend months trying to figure it out but hopefully this will help you realise the difference much faster than I spent time figuring it out :)

Mostly taken from: https://pastebin.com/NdtHc3cF, found in this reddit thread. Added a few of my own.

=== Nyaa Successors ===Nyaa.si - https://nyaa.siNyaa Pantsu - https://nyaa.pantsu.catSukebei Nyaa 2 - https://sukebei.nyaa.siSukebei Pantsu - https://sukebei.pantsu.cat

=== Notable Groups ===HorribleSubs - http://horriblesubs.info (bot rips crunchyroll)Coalgirls - https://coalgirls.wakku.to (high quality encodes)FFFansubs - https://fffansubs.org/?s=NyLeopard Raws - http://leopard-raws.org/Ohys Raws - https://torrents.ohys.net/downloadBeatrice-raws - https://beatrice-raws.org/Doki - https://doki.co/Reinforce - https://forum.touki.ru/open.php

=== Nyaa Alternatives ===Anime Tosho - https://animetosho.org (meta; TT, Anidex)Tokyo Tosho - https://tokyotosho.info (nyaa mirror plus)Nyaarip - new.nyaa.rip/?category=3_5 (nyaa mirror plus)Shana - https://shanaproject.com (nyaa mirror plus)AcgnX - https://www.acgnx.se (nyaa mirror plus)Haruhi - http://haruhichan.comAnidex - http://anidex.info (HS says insecure)Anirena - https://anirena.com (HS says insecure)Anisearch - https://anisearch.ru/en1337x Anime - 1337x.to/popular-anime

=== Direct Downloads ===Fluffy - http://fluffy.isHylia - https://anime.thehylia.comAnime-Sensei - http://anime-sensei.netAnime-Sharing - anime-sharing.com/forum

=== Private ===You currently can’t obtain an account for either BakaBT or Animebytes.

BakaBT - https://bakabt.meAnimebytes - https://animebytes.tvAnimeTorrents - https://animetorrents.me

Gifmaking tutorial: Make and use photoshop actions

Using actions can make everything you do in Photoshop go a lot faster. While you sit back and relax, Photoshop will do all the work. This tutorial will go over how to make the best possible action for gifmaking and how to use it afterwards.

Gifmaking tutorial: Photoshop optimalisation

Photoshop is used for all sorts of things, so there’s loads of tools and settings that will slow you down while you don’t actually need them. In this tutorial I cover performance settings, keyboard shortcuts and workspace layout. 

Gifmaking tutorial: Reducing a gif’s file size

Ever make a gif that is over 3MB and Tumblr won’t accept it? You want to make it smaller without affecting the overall quality? In this tutorial I go over a few methods that will allow you to decrease the file size of your gif without changing its appearance too much!