#gif effect tutorial

so basically just follow this tutorial for loading caps, animating them, and saving. all i'll teach you is how to create the overlay effect.

so first of all you need to load the caps by following that tutorial, and as said they will appear reversed which you can correct by clicking reverse frames. but you need a bit more effort to pull this effect off.

when you get the caps they're reversed and let's say you want a 20-frame gif, then that means you have 40 caps because there are 2 caps for each frame. now, when you press 'make frames into layers' you're going to have 40 frames, because photoshop gives one frame per layer/cap.

so what you want to do is delete frames 21-40 or 1-20, whichever scene is supposed to be colored

and now you have your first gif settled.

next, you need to animate the second scene on top of the first scene by clicking the visibility of the layer each time you move a framec (tiring i know). make sure you're animating them in the right order and not reversed. and also, whenever you make something visible in frame one, it applies to all frames so when you make the first cap visible just select frames 2-20 and make it invisible again.

so now you should have your second scene animated on top of the first scene

  which really isn't the effect since you can't see the first scene anymore. here's the effect part.

group both scenes (just to keep them tidy) in separate groups, one group each scene.so now you have 2 groups, each with a different scene.

click on the colored group and change the blending mode to 'lighten' and BOOM. you have the effect.

but it doesn't look quite good yet, so add colorings, adjustments, and other things.

like my quinn photoset, i made the bottom gif b/w for the both gifs to stand out on their own. so for those of you who want to make a colored over b/w gif as well, listen up.

unfortunately, the effect doesn't look very well with all gifs, because sometimes you can barely see the other scene so what i do is to add black/white spots and adjust the brightness/contrast of the b/w gif, since the lighten mode responds to the darkness/brightness of the picture below. the darker, the more you'll see the colored scene and the lighter you'll see more of the b/w scene. 

oh! and if you're making a colored over b&w gif, you need to distribute the coloring in both groups because you might end up with a b%w gif that looks tinted because of the coloring. see that Group1 under the Channel Mixer? that's the coloring. and you need to put that coloring on top of the caps in the other group.

so here's the finished product :)