GIFFING 101 - YOUR ULTIMATE GUIDE ON HOW TO GIF

I have gotten many, many asks before about how I gif and I finally decided to make a tutorial. This is going to be very long, very image heavy and with a lot of details and examples. I mean it, I’m going through every, single aspect of giffing that I can possibly think of. From start to finish. And please read the disclaimer at the very start.

* I use a macbook pro but this should probably work on windows too!

I hate doing this but if this helped and you want to, please consider donating to my ko-fi or if you want, commission a theme or page from me at @amaanat <3

tutorial under cut, I hope it helps!

hello! I’m so sorry for only getting round to answering this now, it’s been sitting in my inbox for months and since you sent it I’ve completely changed the platform I make my gifs on. I’m now using photoshop cc 2018 but the gifs you must have been referring to were made using completely different, free and accessible software/websites. There’s a lot of photoshop tutorials out there but less so for other options so I’ve decided to just go through my previous process in the hopes that someone will find it useful! 

To be honest, the differences between my gifs BP (before photoshop) and AP (after photoshop) aren’t that huge as long as the video quality is good. It’s easier to add subtitles, to colour and to play around with the gif size/quality, but there’s no need to give your soul away to adobe to create good gifs there’s obviously always the possibility of downloading ps less legally which i of course would never in a million years do. So, to create gifs as I did BP you will need three different things:

Hello! By popular demand (of like 4 people) I am going to write out a tutorial of how I make gifs when I’m on my personal laptop and don’t have access to photoshop. There is another method I use with a different software that is a bit more complicated and if people are interested, I will make a tutorial of that method as well. I’ll do my best to keep this concise, so let’s get started. 

Warning that this is VERY text and image heavy because I know how frustrating it can be when a tutorial feels like it’s skipping steps and I want this to be as clear as possible. Also please read this on desktop, tumblr mobile kills the quality of gifs inside text posts.

This is the video I will be giffing and here is the gif I will be making!

(image heavy! i am also still learning how to gif, so apologies if it's hard to follow!)

this tutorial assumes you have:

basic photoshop knowledge (specifically how to adjust curves, hue/saturation, and color balance)

know basic color theory (in this case, blue/purple canceling out yellow! you need to know what tone of yellow (golden/warm yellow, green tint yellow, etc.) you’re canceling out

a little patience with me! i’m pretty new to giffing and this is my first tutorial.

identifying the kind of yellow:

is it warmer/orangery? use more blue/cyan to cancel out!

is it cooler/more green? use more purple and pink tinted blues to cancel out!

complementary colors (across each other on the color wheel) are your best friend for correcting casts! in this case, we want purple to light blue to combat the yellows. use the color wheel as a guide!

the process:

make your gif — set your delay, make your frames a smart object, do your sharpening, and do one layer of curves (add life back into the skin and try to decrease yellow a little here. set your lightness with the RGB curve now).

i prefer a delay 0.05 or lower. i do smart sharpen based on the gif, and i also am not a cc who sharpens a lot. i also use vapoursynth, which provides some sharpening already.

a really good tutorial for basic giffing in VS and PS can be found here. @wonublr has fantastic tutorials, i highly recommend them.

here we can see delay with nothing else (left), versus the first set of curves and smart sharpening (right)! curves will look different for every gif! don’t worry about trying to match mine. i do slight adjustments on this first one.

already, we can see i’ve corrected some of the yellow by changing the green and blue channels!  this is the sharpening and first set of curves i used for this specific gif!

now, we want a cooling filter (especially useful on really yellow/warm gifs!) i select a color (you find this by going to photo filters, and then select color. this is where the color wheel comes in handy — you want a shade of blue or purple that is complementary to the yellow you’re trying to remove).

i lower the density on this to make it more natural.

next, we do our color balance to combat extra pesky yellows (gifs that are initially less yellow may not need this step!

i adjust shadows, midtones, and highlights very minimally (20→-20, never outside of that range, though it depends on the yellows you're trying to fix).

this helps add contrast and life back into your gifs as well!

on the left is just the cooling filter. on the right, i've done color balance! on both, i have masked the original gif (with only the delay) so you can see the progress!

next, we use our gradient map (once again, depends on how much yellow you’re removing. this will most likely whitewash your gif, so be careful and make sure you know how to re-add that life later if you use gradient maps!). you can make your own, but photoshop has plenty of presets. you want to stay in the purple and blue presents.

once you’ve selected a preset, change it to soft light blending and an opacity of 50 or below.

last two steps!

use hue and saturation to make your coloring how you like it (you’ll likely want to up red saturation to revive the skin!)

do one more layer of curves to make your coloring how you like it and ensure your gif isn’t whitewashed.

here we can see my second curves and what the image looks like with all these changes!

add a watermark if you have one, and you're all done! the left is the original (only delay and my watermark), and the right is everything all done!

addition: two very yellow cast gifs with a mask showing the original vs. my correction following these steps :)