#animated glitch effect tutorial

1. Choose your two images! For this gif, I used a random foggy forest photo, and one of a person on a dock!

2. Make your canvas---the best width for gifs on tumblr I’ve found tends to be 540 pixels! Copy and paste in your images onto two separate layers and resize them as you’d like.

3. Since this simpler version only uses two transition glitch frames (one of them repeated), duplicate each of these image layers twice, so you end up having three identical layers for both images.

On one of your duplicated layers, select all of the image [ctrl+a].

4. Here’s the fun part: find the “Channels” tab (usually on the “Layers” window, or find it under the “Window” tab and activate it), click it. Now, highlight only the “Red” channel.

Should look something like that, and be black and white when you look at your canvas.

5. Nudge your selected layer to the left or right a bit. I usually use the [ctrl+shift+left or right arrow keys] command to do this. Make all of the channels visible again to see your creation!

6. Repeat the previous step with all of the duplicated layers (not the layers with the base images), nudging the channels in different directions and different amounts to give a variety!

7. To get those off kilter rectangles, use the “Rectangular Marquee Tool” (which I just call the rectangle select tool) and select a random horizontal rectangle on one of your duplicated layers. Nudge those rectangles to the left or right like you did in step 5. Repeat this step a bunch all over your canvas to get something like the mess below!

8. That looks like a terrible mess. Awesome. Do this same thing to all of your duplicated layers, again varying what directions and amounts of movement you do!

9. ANIMATION TIME. Bring up the “Timeline” window (or “Animation”, or whatever it’s called in your program). “Create Frame Animation”. Make it so you have eight frames to work with by clicking that little square with the folded corner button.

10. Change the times to what I have above if you want to match my gif’s timing, with 3 seconds for the base frames. and 0.08 seconds for the transition glitch frames. Feel free to change this up!

11. Select the second frame, and make your first glitchy layer visible (keeping the base image layer visible to fill in the transparent spots). Do this on your fourth frame, too. On the third frame, make this glitchy layer invisible and make your second glitchy layer visible. Repeat this for your second image and the 5th, 6th and 8th, and 7th frames in that order.

That was confusing. Does the image help? (Ignore my terrible handwriting, I’m doing this with a mouse.)

12. Under “File” find “Save for Web...” and save it! Now you should be able to upload your finished gif to Tumblr using the “Upload Photos” or “Insert Photo” options~