GIF Tutorial | blurring credits and subjects.
Hi! I got asked how to do this so I thought I'd write up tutorial to make it clear, I've tried to keep this accessible to basic levels but you are going to need basic giffing skills (aka how to make a gif). And obviously you'll need Photoshop, I rarely use Photopea so I don't know how much or if any of this is transferable.
I'll touch on the following during this tutorial, if you already know them then you'll probably pick this up quickly:
How to get to the video timeline
Get your frames into Photoshop and start your basic gifmaking process, for me that means resizing to the correct dimensions and saving the PSD. Then we're moving on to sharpening.
I don't know how you sharpen personally, if you use a different process than me I recommend you go through that before doing this so that the sharpen doesn't change your blur. If you sharpen the same way I do then you just need to make sure you follow the layer order.
So I sharpen using the smart object method, which means I switch to the video timeline
So here we're in frame animation timeline, click the timeline menu and select Convert to Video Animation
Now you'll see that all my frames are still individual layers on the layer sidebar and in the timeline, we need to convert it into one smart object, to do this right click on your layers and bring up this menu, then click Convert to Smart Object
If you scrub through the video you'll see the gif still plays because all the frames are still there in the smart object, this is helpful for applying filters to all frames in one go, for instance, when sharpening or applying a blur.
I've gone ahead and applied a basic sharpening, so you should do the same now then we'll move on to actually blurring
So you've definitely noticed the big text in the above example, I've chosen this example because it's a little more complex as the credits go across multiple lines and at different font sizes, but you can simplify to your needs. Blurring credits is very useful if you want to put subtitle text on a scene but the credits are distracting from the readability.
So first you should duplicate your smart object, I've put the previous one in a folder just to make it less visible throughout this tutorial so you can see what layer to focus on, however you MUST make sure that your blur smart object layer is above your regular smart object:
So now just apply a Gaussian blur smart filter to this active layer, I set my credit blurs to approximately 5/6px ±1, in this case I went with 6px for now, you can always adjust this by double clicking on the smart filter in the layer sidebar to open it
So obviously we don't wanna apply this blur to the whole image, which is where our good friend the layer mask comes in.
So first I'll select the area to mask using the rectangular Marquee Tool, you'll also notice up the top that I'm in additive mode (the modes from left to right are new / add / subtract / intersect if you're curious, you'll see a little plus next to your cursor in add, a minus in subtract, and an x in intersect), the reason I'm in the add mode is because I have to make multiple rectangles for these specific credits, this is not as relevant if you're only doing one
So now all you have to do is drag across the screen (while using this tool!) to select the area you want, like I said I'm using the add mode to add multiple shapes to my selection:
So now you can go ahead and make your layer mask by simply clicking the layer mask option while your selection is active (make sure you're on the right active layer!):
On a layer mask the black part is the invisible parts and the white notes what part of the layer is still seen. If you'd like you could just leave it here and continue on, but personally I like to soften the edges, there's two main ways to do that:
The pros of the feather over the next method is that feathering keeps it more uniform, which is why this is how I do credits, but you do have to mind the pixel distance of your selection so that you don't negate your blur.
So let's undo that layer mask and go back to the selection, then right click and simply hit Feather, this will bring up the Feather Selection dialogue box, I set my radius at 3 pixels this time, but you're going to have to adjust based on your needs, I wouldn't go too much farther than that though as the feather goes inward into your selection and can start to unblur the edges of your text
Here's an example of going too far with feather, in this case I set it to 15 to demonstrate, it looks more like it's water damaged than actually blurred:
If you don't want to use feather, you can instead use a soft brush to extend the edges, I'll be using this in the next section too. Using a soft brush on a layer mask is pretty simple but it is more manual.
Simply make sure you are actively on the layer mask part of the layer, signified by the corner outline, you want to be the second of these images:
Then select the soft brush tool and use it to draw around the edges of the mask
Here's the result as a gif (feathering for this example):
So you're done blurring, you could just finish here, but if the credits fade out before your gif ends you could be stuck with a large obvious blur that's not serving any purpose, and you may want to fade it out.
Deciding whether to fade out is personal taste, but for me I choose based on how much of the gif is left after the text is gone, if it's only a few frames then it's not worth the hassle, but if it's more like half the gif then give a fade out a shot!
So the easiest way to do this is to use the fade transition in video timeline, just drag and drop the Fade transition to the end of your blur layer
You can adjust the length of the fade by dragging the transition across the layer. Now what you wanna do is adjust the length of the blur layer so it matches up -- it's important however to delay this layer fade transition to just after the actual fade out of the credits text, otherwise the blur will disappear too quickly, example below: (left is no delay, right with a slight delay)
Pretty simple right? However if you're like me and you convert back to frame animation after you're done with smart filters, make sure to check the Finalising section. Otherwise if all you want to know about is credits and you use video timeline then you're good to go.
I'll use another scene for this example, let's say I want to focus on Vala in this scene, but oh Daniel's there 😑 let's blur him out!
So follow the same steps as credits to make the blur copy layer, then add the layer mask without a selection, then, with the layer mask selected invert it (CTRL + I) so it fills with black.
Add the blur filter, in this case I used a blur of 3 pixels, and I'd stay on the lower side in general when blurring a subject like this so it's not super stark, making it look more like a natural focus.
Then just go in with a soft brush (use white colour) and draw over the subject you want to blur. You can play around with the opacity of the brush (and size!) and switch back to black to touch up the sides
Now you can also fade out the subject blur if your subject leaves. If your subject is moving a lot and you wanna get all flash with it you can unlink the layer mask and use Layer Mask Position Keyframes to move it around with the subject, but I'm running out of images and this is already long so if anyone wants that I'll put it in another post. It's really not necessary though.
For video timeline giffers, you're already done and can just finish up the gif as you usually would. For frame timeline lovers like myself we have a few extra steps.
Firstly, we have to flatten our smart object then convert back to the frame animation timeline, make sure to flatten first.
If you've added a fade transition you're going to get some extra frames at the point of the fade you'll need to go in and delete, it adds an extra frame for every frame of fade, so you'll have two frames next to each other that are exactly the same. If you leave it as is the gif will look like it's stuttering. Just go in and delete every other frame (in that section only!!! check that they're duplicates before deleting or you'll stutter in the opposite way!) and then you're done.
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