PSCS5

step 1: pick your screencaps

make sure they’re high quality

colorful/vibrant already

easy to mask (masking is really important here)

also figure out what color scheme you want to do! personally i like to organize it by warm colors on one side and cool colors on the other side but you can mix and match like this picspam 

step 2: cropping

you can def choose whatever sizes you’d like but for my picspams each cap is 270px by 150px and the full size is 540px by 600px

step 3: getting textures 

ok this is where the fun starts! although colorings are important, textures i’d argue are even more important and can elevate your picspam to a whole new level! and can even be used as a coloring (will explain later)

light leak textures / gradient textures such as:

textured textures (yes you read that right lol) such as:

step 4: base coloring

always start off with a base coloring on your cap which essentially just needs to be things like brightness, contrast, and/or vibrance etc. also a neat trick i learned is duplicating the cap layer and setting it to screen which can be used as a base coloring

example of duplicating layer + setting it to screen (it just brightens a bit)

step 5: the colorful coloring

so here is an example of taking a dull cap and making it super duper colorful <3

here are all the adjustments used:

vibrance: +100 (adjust as needed for your particular cap)

selective color: this is REALLY important so based on the color you want to bring out click that selective color. so for this cap i wanted to bring out yellows so i clicked the yellow tab and set it to +100

basic brightness/contrast. i usually like to add more contrast as it makes colors pop

another selective color layer

then a layer of a soft brush of yellow or a light leak on the corner and i set it to screen (screen is your bff here)

and then a few more layers of color balance, i just shifted it to be more cyan so i can bring out some greens + brightness etc,

this is what I mean by soft brush or light leak (adjust colors as needed):

step 6: coloring but also using textures

for this, same as before, have a base coloring and i also added a layer of solid yellow color and set it to ‘color burn’ so you don’t even need to color anything!! the layer of yellow + color burn or even dark, multiply etc will do that for you

next, slap on a texture of your choice and set it to multiply and you’re done

tips:

always always use a mask on every layer so you can easily erase adjustments where it shouldn’t be

if you want to add more colors use gradient map and set it from black to whatever color you want and then set it to soft light or screen and adjust opacity as needed

selective color if your bff here

light leaks go a long way! using light leaks or just soft brushes and setting it to screen or soft light make picspams pretty :)

use topaz labs if possible to sharpen! it just looks super clean

color fill is also great to use to make a cap more warm or cool toned

you can use light leaks, gradient textures, gradient maps, or solid colors and set it to multiply for a hassle-free quick coloring

this is my first tutorial so apologies if it doesn’t make sense! im happy to answer questions just shoot me a message <3

and don’t forget to tag me in your creations folks! i’d love to see them

RESIZING YOUR GIFS

the first thing I do when I import my caps is crop it down - and as I said, i'm lazy so I have all of my regular sizes saved so I can just select them. as you can see - they are all +2px larger than the tumblr dimensions and that is because if you ever see that weird little white border you sometimes get when making gifs? if you remove pixels off you won't get that so when cropping it's essential to add some pixels so that you have some to crop off (I hope that makes sense!)

these are my settings for scaling my images down.

MAKING YOUR GIF

as i said, i'm lazy - so once I have cropped my caps to whatever size I want, all I do is click on my action and let it do it's thing. I have it set where it sharpens and converts back to timeline with the 0.05 time delay so you don't have to reopen your gifs in photoshop again and save them.

the two windows that pop up are to allow you to adjust the settings if you wish - if you like it just click ok and it will continue on.

you can download the action pack here (you can just add more actions for resizing to suit your dimensions or do it manually by going to canvas and -2px when you are done making your gif before saving) there are two settings - one for 4k/HD and the other for HD where the sharpening is a little softer.

obviously, the higher quality the source footage, the better your gif looks. i tend to work with 1080p downloads and I rip my own blurays and save them at around 4GB per 40 minute episodes and 12-15GB for films. sometimes more depending on the length of the film.

external hard drives are your friends. if you are going to be giffing stuff often, keep them saved there. I have a ton of externals (which are in dire need of organisation) but it's so much quicker to have stuff at hand than needing to download each time you want to gif.

as for trailers - you get far higher quality using the trailers posted to the apple trailer site than youtube. so check there if you can get it. i use this site to download them and it does make a difference.

SAVING YOUR GIF

it's all down to personal preference what you like - but I use these settings when saving my gifs. you can play around with diffusion, pattern and noise etc to find what you think looks best for you. just remember that your gif must be under 10MB or else it won't upload to tumblr.

EXAMPLES

here are some examples of more gifs made using the sharpen action.

and this is the above moon knight gif, but using the slightly less sharper setting. sometimes it's best to test out both on footage you haven't used before to see which you prefer.

1. Open your episode/movie in quicktime player. Screen record the moment or scene from which you’re making your gif out of. Name it, save it somewhere that you can find it. 

(You can also just skip this step and drag the entire episode into photoshop, I prefer not to in most cases, because the file is pretty huge and my RAM can’t handle it, but, you do you.)

2. Open your screen recorded clip in photoshop. I just drag the clip directly onto the ps icon.

3. Right click the blue timeline bar, this will pop up.

This is how I change the speed of the gif. I no longer work with frames, since it’s so much faster to just do everything in timeline. 

Typically, I change the speed anywhere between 65% and 85% depending on the clip. For Riverdale episodes, 75-80% looks the most natural to me.

You have to move the duration bar ALL THE WAY to the right EVERY TIME to compensate for the speed change, otherwise half of your clip will be cut off.

**Step 3 MUST be done before you do anything else because once you resize, the clip is converted and you can no longer change the speed unless you go back to an earlier history state, so play it and make sure it’s at the speed you want.

4. Drag the current-time indicator (or C-TI) to the place you want your gif to start, set your new work area according to that point, and then do the same for the point at which you want the gif to end.

PRO TIP: play with this slide viewer to get a better look at what you’re doing.

5. Now you can crop and resize. These are my resize settings.

When you resize, this will also pop up. 

Once you convert the clip, your bar will turn purple and you’ll notice you can no longer change the speed of the clip, so once again, make sure it’s at the right speed before you continue by going to export > save for web > hit the preview button to open the gif in your browser.

Too slow? Go back in your history before the conversion and increase the speed by 5%, then resize again.

This is 75%:

This is 80%:

The faster speed looks the most natural so I’m sticking with 80.

6. As you might normally, right click the gif layer and convert into a smart object to add your sharpen. Color your gif or add your psd.

IMPORTANT THINGS TO BE AWARE OF:

One thing you might notice is that every time you add a new coloring layer, it will automatically be clipped to the one below in the video group layer.

This is important to be aware of because if you add a layer in between any of these current layers, all the ones above that layer might become “invisible”.  

For example, when you add a new blank layer on top of all of them, it will NOT be clipped to the others, and you will have to right click that layer and click “create clipping mask” in order to make it be a part of that video layer group. Otherwise, you won’t be able to take a brush to it. 

Another complication that may arise is that when adding text, you’ll notice that the C-TI has moved to the text layer, the text layer is in the same timeline group, and now all you can see is the text without the gif: 

You’ll also notice that creating a clipping mask for a text layer isn’t an option, unless you convert it to a smart object first. I don’t bother with this.

What I do instead is drag the text layer out of the video group and put it on top.

Now you need to drag the text layer in your timeline to align at least with your work area, then move the C-TI back into that work area (you may also have to drag the ends to expand that layer so that it will fit in the work area).

And there you have it!

My save for web settings: