#creativity tag

this is the first time i've drawn him in a year or so, best design yet, harlequin looks so good on him.

Wow, this is so kind of you to say! Thank you! For ease, I've composed some bullet points. This should get you started.

I use Adobe Photoshop 2021, also known as 22.2. Here is a tutorial on how you can access older versions of Photoshop (if you have a Photoshop subscription). There are ways to make gifs without Photoshop but I'm afraid I don't know any of them.

This is the tutorial I used when I was just learning how to make gifs about five years ago. (Wayback Machine link here.) It's super simple, super clear, and super helpful for beginners.

This is the action I use to sharpen my gifs, with a slight edit so that it sets the frame delay to 0.05. (Wayback Machine link here.) Here is an additional sharpening tutorial if you don't want to get into actions yet. (Wayback Machine link here.)

I use this light point/dark point technique to brighten up and/or color-correct most of my gifs, especially if they are dark or weirdly-colored (Wayback Machine link here). I also use various other adjustment layers for these purposes, including Brightness/Contrast, Color Balance and Selective Color. It's hard to give specific advice here because so much of my gifmaking is screwing around with various layers until it looks the way I want. Learning to gif is a hands-on process!

Tutorials for a few additional effects you may have seen on my blog or on others' blogs: basic subtitle advice (alt link), blending and splicing gifs (alt link), fun text stuff (alt link), glitch effect (alt link).

Here is the website I use to create the colorful text for my gif posts. Getting it to work requires a few extra steps and some website-transferring, but once you get the hang of it, it's super simple. Basically: type whatever you want, select your color(s), scroll down, and copy the output text in the HTML box. You'll need to remove the semicolons from this output text for it to work on Tumblr. You can do that manually (bleh) or you can take a shortcut: paste that text into the input box on this website, with ; in the "find text" box and nothing in the "replace text" box. Once you have your semicolonless text, head over to Tumblr. Click the gear at the top right of your post, scroll down a bit, and switch the text-editor mode from "rich text" to "HTML." Then paste your HTML text into the post and boom, you're done!

^ Don't fiddle around with any of the additional customizations (the "bold" checkbox, the "font" dropdown, and so on) on the first website. It's never worked for me, so I just add in the bold/italics/whatever effect directly on the Tumblr post once I've pasted in the HTML text.

@usergif's directory page is a great resource for all sorts of random tutorials once you're ready to build your skills.