essentially this is what's happening and what we gonna do:

before we dive into the how tho, it must be said that photoshop's timeline can only do linear movements so no easing. at times it can look unnatural or choppy or... frankly both. (if you want to know more about this look up ease-in-out animation curve, or easing curves)

part 01 · prepping gifs

as i wrote in my gif making process post i usually crop my gifs bigger than they usually will be. e.g. a 268px gif will be cropped to anything between 468-540px. sometimes because i want to have the opportunity to position the gif a bit differently but most of the time because i know 268px is a reeeaaalllyyy tight place and i need to make some movement adjustments especially for weekend music shows where the camerapeople seem to be on crack or just very into experimenting

part 02 · let the keyframe madness begin

whichever way you are making gifs just open up your gif and crop it to the final size, colour it and whatever else you fancy. once you have everything ready just open your video layer on your timeline (if you don't know where you will be able to see it in the video later)

you will see 3 tracks, transform, opacity and style. for this we will use the transform because it contains movements (but also resizing if that's what you fancy).

all we need to do is create keyframes which will define what is the position of the video layer at a certain time. so e.g. here we are moving this box to the right by 50px in 1 second.

to create keyframes click on the timer icon in front of the position label and photoshop will create you one. the active one will always be yellow. if you move on the timeline with your playhead (that thing that is moving) and you resize/move your layer photoshop will create yet another keyframe for you without you needing to click on it, because it will recognise the change. so all you need to figure out is when the movement starts and which position your layer should be, and the same for the end and ps will take care of the rest.

part 03 · some things to consider when panning gifs

now this is the part where it gets subjective and less tutorial like. so all i can provide is some explanation how i go about it and what i pay attention to.

tip #1: match the movement speed to the gif

whenever you are panning a gif it may result in the gif being choppy bc the framerate and your movements are not matching up, so it's either too fast and photoshop needs to move your image by too many pixels frame by frame or it's too slow resulting in basically the same thing but kinda reversed, either way it won't look smooth. this mostly happens when the original footage is moving (there is a quick camera pan/movement) and you are trying to keep it in place, less when the original is kinda still and the subject is moving. this is kind of a trial and error process: try moving your keyframes closer to each other or maybe further, add more/less movement between two keyframes and just see witch results in a smoother gif.

tip #2: try moving your gif once in one direction

there are times when your subject might go out of frame multiple times and you have the urge to keyframe the whole gif and keep them in center the whole time. however, as we do not have easing curves in photoshop the switch between moving something from one direction to the other one will be very visible. so try placing your subject in a way that you'll only need to make one movement and it's kinda okay all the way thru or pick the most annoying 'placement' you want to correct. here in this example it mostly bugged me that the gif was not centered at the end, but onda kinda remained in frame.

tip #3: pan your gifs when there is a quick zoom/movement

sometimes whatever i do the gif will look choppy regardless one movement or not. in these moments, and these moments ONLY we can be thankful for the sometimes unnecessary zooming that's happening and reposition our gifs while the zooming is happening. since there is already a drastic movement you can get away with basically anything, as long as you time the beginning and the end where the zoom begins and ends. also i must add that you can pan stage gifs way more and more drastically bc there is a lot of things happening in the background, so adding a bit of movement on top of all the other movements is less noticeable than... moving footage where e.g. the background is static.

✨something extra✨ · panning/moving other things

so what we looked at is moving the whole gif to fit into the frame we have, but with this technique obviously you can move all sorts of stuff, text, texture whatever you fancy. you can apply this process to the layer you wanna move and this is when you get these:

a sidenote: the fade effect is literally the same keyframe business but instead of playing with position keyframes you change the opacity keyframes.

aaand that is all, if you have any questions my askbox is always open so hmu <3