#ari does tutorials

first off, i use photoshop cs6, and i'm making this tutorial for people who already have a general knowledge of where tools and stuff are in photoshop. if you need help finding stuff, just lemme know and i'll be glad to help!

so to start off, YOU NEED GOOD HD MOVIES. SRSLY. i use utorrent to torrent them, and i normally get my movies from yify because they have the BEST torrents imo. they're almost always 720 or 1080

so, import your video and choose the section you want to gif!

so this gif is only 27 frames long. now we need to delete the frames and layers that we don't want. you do that by selecting the frames you don't want in your gif and deleting them. then you do the same with the layers. if you need more info on how to do this, go ahead and ask me

next thing i wanna do is crop it because it's too wide. so whoop-de-doo, we take out our handy lil crop tool and shorten this sucker down

so now we have this

next thing i do is change the frame rate delay! i usually change it to 0.06, but you can change according to how you want the gif to look

next thing i do is resize my gif to 500px, because that's normally the size you want a gif to be if it's just one gif all the way across. here's a sizing chart!

so now that our gif is the correct size, we sharpen. i use smart sharpen, and i sharpen every frame and layer individually, i don't use any actions. here are my settings:

so now, here's how our gif is looking!

looks pretty good, but i want to colour it. here's the basics of how i normally colour. i add some vibrance;

some brightness:

LEVELS (aka my favourite thing ever):

and then i added a fill layer and lowered the opacity, but i didn't screenshot that step because adding a fill layer is different for every gif. then i add my watermark and save the gif! these are my save settings:

and this is our final product!!!

aight so first off, i got my aurora pic that i wanted to use

and of course, i needed to crop it. so i got out the polygonal lasso tool, aka the most helpful lil bugger in the entire world

what a pal. so anyway, you're gonna take that and you're gonna start to kind of click around as closely as you can

once you actually do it yourself you'll get the hang of it, it's a weird tool but it's amazing, i can't live without it. so anyway once you've finished going around your entire picture

(which i have here you just can't see it too well), you're going to right click and select 'select inverse'

after you've done that, press delete to get rid of all the background! then what you need to do is click refine edge, here it is and here are my settings for it

then i added some colouring to brighten it up and i saved it as a png file so that i can move the entire coloured file to my texture without colouring the texture itself. i opened up my texture (which i got from this pack)

opened up my png file

and dragged it onto the texture!

and as you might notice, aurora's body cuts off rather suddenly and i don't really like how that looks, so we're going to put in a gradient. first you have to use the eyedropper tool to get the colour of the gradient you want (the kind i used is an almost eggshell white). 

then, on the layer you pulled onto the texture, we're going to put a mask. it's super easy

select the layer and click that little button and you're done with the mask. next you're going to select the gradient tool

and then you drag from the bottom of the picture up, until you're happy with the look

i'm not going to give a tutorial on how i did the text because it's not really that special (the font i used was enchanted prairie dog) so yeah, the final product is this

also just to make sure you're aware, this isn't a gif tutorial, but if you want to know how to make those you can either see my FAQ or ask for a better tutorial

okay so this is the gif we're starting with

biiiiiig difference. okay so, first thing i did was bump up the vibrance, and these are my settings. i didn't mess with the saturation cuz i didn't like how it was looking

then i added some brightness

so by now, here's how the gif is looking

okay now the next part is THE most important part imo, this is what gives the gif the pastel-y look and idk it's my favourite tool in photoshop i love it

LEVEEEEEEELS

you can mess around with this part as much as you want, but for the pastel look i'd suggest anywhere between 1.3-1.7

and it makes the gif look like this

almost there, one more step! i don't think it looks quite bright enough, so i bring out my trusty curves tool

 and of course, we end up with this!