#faststone

UPDATED ON NOVEMBER 3RD 2019.

I will try to explain in this post how I make them and the things I’ve learned so far. I’m open to contributions. 

This is one of several ways in which you can make gifs; the one I find the easier and most intuitive. The secret is to find the one that suits you best. 

Making a gif consists essentially of three basic steps:

Getting the clip you want to make a gif out of.

Making the actual gif.

Editing the frames (modifying color and speed, adding text or watermarks, sizing it down the Tumblr limit, and so on.)

1) Getting the clips:

The two most usual ways to do this is by downloading a clip from YouTube or by trimming the scene we want to gif from a larger file we have saved to our hard drive.

Downloading/trimming videos with VLC Player: VLC Player is an application that, even if not fancy, is an easy and useful tool to take snapshots, trim clips and even download videos. You can download the application for free from the official website here.

Downloading/trimming videos with Real Player/Real Trimmer: You can download this program for free from the official website here. This program has an option to add a Chrome extension to Google Chrome that allows you to download clips from Youtube with one clic as explained here. The files will be saved to the Video folder of your pc, on a sub folder called Real Player Downloads. An explanation about how to trim videos with Real Trimmer (you can install it as you install Real Player) can be found here.

2) Making the gif:

For this step I work with a life saving website called ezgif.com

Now that you have downloaded/trimmed your clip (note: for ez to be able to process your video, it must be 100mB or smaller in size) I recommend you to create a folder for your gif/gifset. It will be useful later. I personally have a “My gifsets” folder and then sub folders on it: ones to save the finished gifsets (”MCU”, “Austenland”, “Stephine”) and another called “To process” (We’ll get back to this one later).

Upon accesing ez, the website will show you this:

(It may take a little while to upload. Be patient.)

(Don’t worry if some unwanted frames make the cut: we’ll dispose them later.)

You’ll probably have now the draft of a pretty (and pretty heavy) gif. The first goal is to reduce the file size of the gif as much as we can. Keep in mind that Tumblr’s maximum size for a gif is 8Mb, and the width of the dash is of 500px. Below your new gif, you are going to find the following buttons:

crop: this part is pretty simple and intuitive. You can choose between several preset size ratios or create your own. The important thing to keep in mind here is that if you are going to make a gifset, all your gifs must have the same height and width. I recommend you to write down the final width and height of your gif (It appears on the first box below the gif, after “left” and “top”). Clic on “crop image” and the cropped version will appear. On the box below this latter, clic on “resize”.

Resize: I personally like large gifs, though, for a two column gifset you won’t need gifs wider than 250pp. I think, for that kind of gifset, 400pp is a good width to reduce size and at the same time allow people to enlarge the images. For a post-wide gif, 500pp is the ideal size, though 450-475pp can still work somewhat ok. Of course, you can try a wider size first and then make it smaller later if you find you need to. Width and height aren’t the only factors that affect gif size: the number of colors and frames are very important too.

Once this step is completed, we move on to frames. This is where we get rid of those unwanted frames we spoke of before. Generally speaking, a Tumblr gif of a decent quality made this way will have between 50 and 66 frames (again, a smaller gif with few colors on it will allow far more frames than a wide, color-varied one.) If our gif is still too large (Over 10Mb) we will have to remove more frames. You must take care of removing a frame every a constant number of frames (every 5th frame, every 8th frame) or otherwise the gif will move unevenly. You can check how lighter your gif is getting by clicking on “Make a gif” and checking the size below the image.

Speed: usually we want to emphasize what happened in the scene and to that purpose we need to slow it down a bit, between a 90% and 95% of the normal speed. If you have removed frames in the middle, you’ll have to slow the gif down to the 80-60% of its speed at this stage.

Once we have done this (it doesn’t matter if our gif is still over 3Mb. It is enough if we have downsized it to somewhere in between 9.5Mb and 12Mb), we’ll click on “split” and then, on the next page, on “split to frames”. Then we’ll scroll down to the bottom and click on “download frames as zip”. Once the file is downloaded, we are ready for step 3.

3) Editing the frames:

For this step you are going to need FastStone Image Viewer, an image editor you can download for free from the official website here. This program, which is similar to what Picasa used to be, has the main advantage of allowing you to process images in bulk.

One of the main drawbacks of using ez is that it dulls the brightness and contrast of the original video. Faststone allows us to correct that, and also to do things like adding text without making the gif that much heavier, adding a watermark, and so on.

Editing contrast, brightness, etc: Once we have installed Faststone, we’ll unzip the images into the folder we have made for this purpose (the “to process” folder I mentioned above) and open it from the Faststone navigator (It works almost exactly like the windows folder explorer, so there won’t be any surprises here). 

On the menu bar, go to “Tools” and then “Open batch convert/rename dialog”. This will open a new window. Click on “add all” and then on “advanced options”. It will show yet another window. Go to the adjustments tab and clic on “design and preview”. Once there you’ll be able to manipulate the different aspects of the image to make it brighter, lighter, etc. Once you are done with this, clic on “close”, then proceed (or not) with the other tabs (text, watermark, etc) and then  clic “ok” on the next window and “convert” on the last one.

Once our images are nicely edited, we’ll go back to ez, and instead of clicking on “video to gif” we’ll click on “gif maker”. We’ll upload the edited images and click on “upload and make a gif”.

Usually after the editing, the new gif is a bit lighter than the one we downloaded first. In any case, if it is still over 8Mb, we are going to need to optimize it. Clic on “optimize” and try different degrees of size reduction up until 20 (I think any compression harder than this makes the gif too grainy). If it is still too heavy, I recommend you to go back and try to crop/resize/remove frames again. Once you achieved the coveted under 8Mb file size, your gif is ready!

Before editing:

After editing:

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