#gif tutorials

Create your canvas, make your shapes and align them in the positions you want them to be in. Then get the gifs you plan on filling your shapes with created on standby.

Things to keep in mind before starting: 1. Many of you may have already learned through experience that photoshop has a tendency to create duplicate frames when you are working with multiple gifs on one canvas. It typically occurs when you don't have the same number of frames in all the gifs that you're combining onto your canvas, or rather, your clips are not perfectly aligned. OR when you are working with keyframes, but this time we will have an exception to that rule for what're doing so I won't be discussing the 0.03-interval rule here but if you're curious, it's fully explained this this tutorial by nik on usergif.

To be on the safe side, load in the same number of frames for all gifs. I usually just load in however many frames for each, and then I trim the clips on both ends to be the same, but they have to be exact. If even a single integer is out of place in timeline, you could still risk getting duplicate frames at the end. 2. When making an edit like this, you have to consider the amount of time you have from start to end to make the transitions and rationally plan them out in the space you have available. The more shapes you use, the more frames your gifs will need to be composed of.

3. If you're trying to get the same effect as in my Final Girl edit, where the black & white is default, and the color phases in and out, my goal here is for the color to be visible for at least 10-15 frames each gif, so with 3 gifs, I figured around 65-70 frames would be a good range.

For my first gif, I intentionally loaded in my gamble of 68 frames. For the other two, I loaded in all that was capped in the folders, moved the clips into the positions I wanted them to be in, put them in their designated layer masks, and then trimmed the clips on both sides to match the initial 68-frame clip. ❗️Remember that they have to be exactly aligned like this and all other trimmed off clips deleted before you start your key-framing❗️

Next you wanna make a group for each gif (highlighted in yellow for visibility) to put your coloring adjustments into with a layer mask for their designated shapes, which should look like this in your layers, and like the below in timeline once aligned with the rest of the clips.

I also just tucked the shape layers into the coloring groups to clean it up. But if you plan on creating frames for the gifs, I suggest you move those layers to the bottom and keep them until the end when they can be used for borders, but if not you can make new shapes later.

Assign a black & white gradient map to each gif with a clipping mask on top of your coloring groups.

Now lets say you're not pleased with the outcome of the black & white like for mine, it desperately needs brighting and contrast.

Add your brighting adjustments as needed, and give every adjustment its corresponding layer mask like below.

Next, duplicate both your gif layer and your coloring group, then select both duplicates, as well as your new b&w color adjustments and convert them into a smart object together.

You should now have your original gif + original coloring group, and one single black & white gif on top.

Do this with the rest of the gifs! If you want, you can also combine your original gif and coloring group into a smart object so you have one colored gif, and one black & white counterpart for each.

Now we add the key frames!

You're going to be adding opacity keyframes to your black and white gif layers only. Decide which gif you want the color reveal to start with, and what your reveal pattern is going to be.

I chose to reveal the color of my first gif 11 marks in, which means I need to add a key frame at the 10th mark as well. This is because we don't want a literal "fade-out" effect, we want the change to be immediate. The first key should be at 100% opacity, and the second at 0%. You shouldn't have to worry about duplicate frames upon conversion because all keyframes will only be 1 integer apart.

Once you've decided where your next reveal will start on your second gif of choice, repeat the process.

Then you have to add more 2 more key frames to the prior gif to transition it back into black & white. This needs to occur simultaneously as the next gif transitions into color. Where one starts, another ends, and where one ends, another starts, etc.

Follow this process until you have 2 pairs of keyframes on all your gifs (your final gif should only have 1 pair). Whether you want the transitions to be evenly spaced is your choice and I think it looks cleaner that way. For my final girl set, I was trying to simulate an analog effect similar to making a player selection in an old video game so they were placed methodically to be "jumpy". But play with the keyframe intervals between each gif to get them to look the way you want.

Your keyframes should look like this in the end for reference:

Circling back to adding borders, it's the same keyframe process, but on new shape layers on 0% fill +stroke to serve as the border (if you deleted your shapes earlier). Try adding an "outer glow" blending option to make the border more prominent. Then, make sure the opacity keyframes on the shapes align with the keyframes on the gifs.

so for the purposes of this tutorial, we will be using Adobe Photoshop, which is the most common program for making gifs, and the one I recommend. the version you have doesn't make a major difference in terms of capabilities but the interface may be slightly different looking if you have an older version or a different type of device. you cannot make or edit gifs in any mobile version of the photoshop application. Optionally, we will also be using Adobe Premiere Rush/Pro or another video editing software of your choice. wherever you are downloading Photoshop, whether from Adobe or a third party, you should easily be able to acquire Premiere as well. I am aiming to be as detailed as possible in this tutorial, so it may sound more time consuming than it really is. once you get the hang of things, it goes fast. the most time consuming part by far is the editing and coloring. in my opinion, one thing that majorly saves time while giffing is knowing your keyboard shortcuts and using your mouse/trackpad as little as possible. I will be going over these in this tutorial as well.

before we begin, some general tips:

gifs of single shots that do not cut between angles or subjects generally will look the best, barring exceptions

for a single gif set, choosing scenes and shots with similar lighting will be easiest to get to look uniform when compiled together, since editing wildly different looking scenes to have similar coloring and lighting is hard and takes some practice!

avoid shots that will require you to majorly crop or zoom to properly frame the subject, as this will greatly diminish quality

speaking of quality, gifs will look best using 1080p video, but you can get away with 720p as well. I would not recommend giffing with anything lower resolution than that

Tumblr's upload capacity for image and gif files is 10mb. be sure when exporting your finished gif that it is under that size. if it is a bit over, you can try trimming a few frames off your gif in the video timeline.

if you get frustrated, don't give up! giffing is hard and complicated especially if you are new to photoshop. I tried to make this tutorial as detailed as possible so it's easy to understand (although im sure I still forgot some stuff)

ok onto the tutorial!!!

STEP ONE: choose what range of frames you want to gif, and how.

once you have decided what you want to gif, there are two main way to convert your episode into a range of frames to make into a gif. the first is by screencapping. this involves downloading a program like mplayer or vlc which can be used to convert video files into "stacks" of screencaps, which can then be separated into whatever range of frames you want and imported into photoshop. this is seemingly by far the most common method I have seen amongst gifmakers*, but personally I don't care for it and I think it's more confusing and time consuming overall, so I will be explaining the second method: importing video frames to layers.

now, normally what this would mean is opening the full episode in photoshop and using the pathetic little playheads on either end of the scrub bar to trim the file into a clip. this is where your video editing software comes into play.

open whatever episode or movie you want to gif in your program. if it is a large file like a long movie in 1080p, this may take a few seconds. like I said, I am using Premiere Rush. I will be using a random episode of 9-1-1 for my example gif.

in your media browser, hover over whichever episode you want (you can also just add the whole episode to your project and scrub through, but that can take longer unless you know what time stamp you're after). click the fullscreen button by the bottom righthand corner.

now you can scrub through and trim the episode before you even import it to premiere. this makes trimming your clip even easier.

use the trim bar (yellow outlines) to trim as close as you can around the scene you want to gif.

then click this plus, and then "add" below. this will add the clip to your project.

now, move the blue playhead up to the frame you want your gif to start on. then, use the scissors button off to the left to slice the clip. select the portion before the playhead, and delete it.

now move the playhead to where you want the gif to stop. a good length for most gifs is around 1.5-2 seconds in my opinion. some may be shorter depending on how long the shot is, or longer if you plan on making them smaller (remember, the uploading capacity on Tumblr is 10mb per file.) trim again, now delete the portion after the playhead. you can also use the left and right arrows beside the play button to move frame by frame, and you can adjust the side of the horizontal scroll bar below your clip to “zoom” in on it and make scrubbing easier.

once you have your clip, go up to where it says "share". your clip will be rendered, and then you can click export to save it.

repeat step one as many times as you want for each gif. I know this may sound complicated, but like I said above once you get in the rhythm this step takes only a few seconds.

STEP TWO: create your gif!

close premiere. open photoshop. head to the control bar at the top. select file > import > import video frames to layers.

navigate to whatever folder you exported your clip to. select it, and hit enter. a second popup will appear asking you to select your range of frames. since you have already trimmed your clip to your liking, simply hit enter a second time.

now your screen looks like this, and we are going to crop and resize our gif! (troubleshooting: if you do not see the timeline bar at the bottom, select window from the control bar, scroll down, and make sure timeline is selected as part of your workspace. Adjustments and layers should be there automatically but if not add them too).

Tumblr posts are 540px wide, so in order to make my gifs as small as possible while maintaining quality, I typically crop my gifs to be around 550-600px wide, with varying heights depending on what shape I want the gif to be. experiment with this a little and decide what works for you. just don't make the width lower than 540px. once you have the portion of the frame you want inside the cropping grid, hit enter again. sometimes you have to hit it twice.

here are the measurements I am using for this gif

now in your timeline, select frame 1. hold down the shift key and scroll to the end to select the very last frame, thereby highlighting them all. from here we will edit our frame delay rate. photoshop will automatically set it to .03s, which will make your finished gif awkwardly fast. I typically use .05s, or .06s if I want a gif to be subtly slower (this comes in handy if the shot you are trying to gif is very short). anything longer than .06s will look weird though. choose "other" from this menu and type in your delay rate. make sure not to miss the zero after the decimal.

once you've set your frame rate, go to the other end of your timeline and click here to convert your frames into a video timeline.

then press option + command + A (on Mac) or windows + alt + A (on PC) to select all layers. then right click (control + click with a trackpad) on any one of the highlighted layers in your layers tab off to the right. scroll down in the popup menu and select Convert to Smart Object.

THAT'S IT!! CONGRATULATIONS!!!!! WE HAVE GIF!!!

from here comes the fun part!! you will begin adding action filters like sharpening as well as adjustment layers to color and edit your gif. experiment with different adjustments and styles until you find something you like. too many adjustment layers will up the size of the finished gif though, so I tend to keep mine to 3-4 layers max unless its a really hard to color scene. if anyone is interested in a separate coloring tutorial, please let me know!

once you are finished editing your gif, click file > export > save for web (legacy) OR hit shift + option + command + S. play your gif in the export window to make sure it looks okay, and then hit save!

I hope you guys find this helpful and informative! please hit up my in box if you have any questions or if anything doesn't make sense. happy giffing!!!

*one reason people seem to prefer screencapping to this method, is saving all the individual clips as video files does take up a lot of space on your scratch drive, which in turn can cause your computer to work slowly or crash programs. this can be rectified by making sure to delete the clips from your computer once you are done making the gifs. another space hoarder to look out for is the proxy files of your episodes that will be automatically saved to your hard drive whenever you add an episode to your project in Premiere. Periodically, go through your storage and delete all the .proxy video files. this will not delete the original episode files, only the proxy files created by Premiere.

A few notes before I begin: 1) this is like, the bare minimum most basic way to color a gif. This is what I’d be doing if I was giffing a scene and that’s it. If you’re interested in different coloring styles (like my suite life episode series) then let me know! 2) When coloring gifs with POC, you need to make sure not to change their skin color by making them too light, too orange, too yellow etc. The JATP source blog posted a masterpost of different tutorials to teach you how to color gifs in different ways (like with the pastel coloring for instance) without whitewashing/orangewashing POC. But, honestly there’s a ton of tutorials out there that show you how to avoid this if you do a little digging. NO EXCUSES! 

Anyway, let's get started! Before I do the coloring, I ofc make my gif, crop it, set the frame rate, resize, and sharpen. (you can find my sharpening tutorial HERE)

I. BRIGHTENING

(as a quick note, I don't focus much on London's skin tone during this stage, because I'm going to fix it during later steps)

The first thing I do is white balance using a curves layer. To do this, I click the little circle thing in the toolbar below the layers, and then click curves like so (you'll do this every time you want to add a new layer):

And then I click the bottom eyedropper tool on the left-hand side:

Then I click the lightest white part of the gif. (I’m not sure how to explain this well, but it basically white balances that spot to make it pure white. Like, if I clicked on the gold part of London's bracelet, then the whole gif would turn out really blue because it would be trying to white balance the gold) (hopefully that makes at least a little bit of sense)

Anyway, there’s a trick I use to find the lightest part of the gif; hold down the option key (or alt if you’re on windows) and while you’re holding down the option key, drag the little white arrow on the right-hand side:

(i apologize for the quality of the screenshots, tumblr keeps destroying them :/ let me know if I need to clarify anything)

Then I use another curves layer to do the same thing with but with the blacks. So, I add another curves layer, and then click the eyedropper tool at the top this time:

And then I click the darkest, black part of the gif. You can use the same trick by holding the option/alt key and dragging the triangle on the left-hand side:

Next, I add a levels layer. I drag the middle lever thing to the left, and the left lever to the right. (I don’t usually touch the little lever thing on the far-right, but it’s really up to personal preference. I learned to color gifs by basically messing around with settings, so I’d recommend doing the same and just seeing what you like best):

Finally, if I want to go even brighter, I usually add a brightness/contrast layer. I typically turn up the brightness a bit, and turn down the contrast. But, since I brightened a lot with the curves and levels, I usually don’t go that far. These were the settings I used for this particular gif (even though I'm going to share most of the settings that I used, I wouldn't recommend using the exact same ones on your own gif as it'll really depend on the scene you're using):

II. VIBRANCE

Now I add a vibrance layer. I like my gifs to be bright and vibrant, so I usually turn up the vibrance, and turn down the saturation a bit. These are the settings I used for this particular gif:

And this is what the gif looks like so far with just brightening it up a bit and adding vibrance (it might look a bit too bright right now, but I'm going to fix that in later steps):

III. SELECTIVE COLOR

Now, I add a selective color layer. The reds and yellows typically affect skin tones, so this is where I'll start to fix London's. These are the settings I used for this gif (I usually wouldn't change all of the colors, but this is just one of those situations where they happened to be present in the scene I'm giffing):

IV. HUE/SATURATION

now I add a hue/saturation layer. I typically turn up the master saturation to +10 and the lightness between +3 - +5 regardless of the gif. Then if I still need to fix skin tones, I'll mess around with the reds and yellows. These are the settings I used:

V. PHOTO FILTER

Next, I add a photo filter. I usually stick with the default one, I keep the layer set to normal, and I turn the opacity down to 25%:

VI. B&W GRADIENT MAP

finally, I add a black & white gradient map, and I click the little box to reverse it:

Then I set the layer to soft light and I turn the opacity down, between 10% - 20% depending on the gif:

A lot of times, I'll stop here. If I'm satisfied with the way the gif looks, and London's skin isn't too pale/orange/yellow etc, then I could just add my watermark, export and be done. But, there a few other optional steps I might take if I'm still not quite happy with it.

VII. OPTIONAL

Usually the next thing I'll add if I've decided to keep going is a color balance layer. It obviously does as it says, helps balance out the colors, but some gifmakers also like their gifs to have like, a reddish tint or a bluish tint or what have you, so this can help with that too. I wanted to balance out the reddish/yellowish tint, so these are the settings I used:

and this was the gif before the color balance:

and after:

And if I want to play around with the colors a bit more, or fix the skin tones further, I might add another selective color layer or a hue/saturation layer (or both, depending).

Rarely, I might add an exposure layer. (I added one to this gif for the purposes of this tutorial). These are the settings I used for that:

And if the gif came out a bit too bright, I might add another brightness/contrast layer, except this time I would turn down the brightness and turn up the contrast (again, I did that with this gif for the purposes of this tutorial).

And, that's pretty much it! This is my finished gif!

Like I said earlier, I pretty much learned how to color by messing around in photoshop, so I would really recommend playing with the different layers and settings for yourself, as well as checking out other coloring tutorials and other gifmakers methods and see what you like and what you don't. And finally, the best thing you can do is just,,, practice. I've been gifmaking for about seven years, but I feel like I didn't really become decent at it until this year

For that particular gif, I just recorded that whole scene and made it into one gif. So the shot of Pacey you see is just the camera cutting away from Joey to Pacey!

However, if you want a gif that looks like that but with scenes that aren't connected. All you have to do is make whatever two gifs you want and then duplicate one gif into the other. By right clicking on one of your gifs to open this menu and clicking the duplicate into option and then clicking on your other gif from the dropdown menu.

Once you have both gifs in the same project, you can just save them as a gif and you'll have a gif that looks like that gif!

I’ll mainly use the gifs above during the tutorial, but I might add one to show a certain step a bit more clearly. I always use more then one scene for my gif tutorials because I want you to be able to see the steps on more then one gif with different lighting, color tones and skin tones so you can get more of a feel of how to use different adjustment layers.

I’m going to start off right after sharpening, and I still use the action linked in my A-Z tutorial. The only difference is on the top layer (there’s only two), I set it to 70% instead of 60%. 

So here are my before gifs (minus one that’s used in the first step): 

As I mentioned, they’ve only been resized (to 268X268) and sharpened. Now let’s jump right in!

1. The first thing I always start with is a "Levels" layer. I want to bump up the entire gif before so I don't have to use so many other brightening layers later. Nothing to drastic, just move the left slider (shadows) towards the middle, the middle slider to the left and the right slider (contrast + brightness) to the left. Remember to only move them a little bit, the next step using curves will do the bulk of the brightening. Here are my level settings:

And my before gif:

and the gif after levels:

2. The next step is to add two "Curves" layers. You could do the next step on one layer, but I like to keep them separate so I can lower the opacity on each individually. But I name one "Curves - White" and "Curves - Black". Using the black and white liquid droppers, you just click on the the darkest and lightest spots on your gif.

You may have to click around to find the perfect spot, and note that if you click on a blueish white or yellow white, it could alter the entire coloring of your gif, so be sure to find a spot that doesn't do that. Don't be afraid to zoom in and click on one single pixel!

You can also click on slightly darker (with the white dropper) or lighter (with the dark dropper) shades to add more contrast, ie clicking on a light gray cloud with the white dropper will turn that shade and any lighter shade pure white and add a lot (or maybe too much) contrast.

So if you want something pure white (#ffffff) use the white dropper and click on the white area of your gif. Here's my gif, I clicked on the snow that’s stuck to his coat on the left next to his ear:

Now, if you want something pure black (#000000) use the black dropper and click on a dark area on your gif. Here's my gif, I clicked on the darkest spot in the center of his beard:

I used the same gif to show you how big of a difference the curves alone make.  Now you can lower the opacity of each layer to your liking. Personally, I like a super contrast look, so I only lowered them 10-15%.

Here's another gif to show you on a different coloring and lighting, the before:

"Curves - White", with the white dropper, I clicked on the sky in the background closer to the window seal where it’s a bit darker:

"Curves - Black", with the black dropper, I clicked on the left side near his eye in the shadow of his hair:

You can see that the gif is way better, but now it’s a bit too pink/magenta. Let’s fix that in our next step.

3. There are two different adjustment layers that I use to balance or “fix” the colors. I'll go over both. The first is the "Color Balance" layer. I only use this if the color looks "off" just a little bit. Here’s the after, followed by how and why:

Like I mentioned, the before gif was a bit too pink. That's a more simple change, so I'll add a "Color Balance" and focus on removing the magenta. If it was more orange, I'd focus on the reds, but pink is more magenta-ish. The shadows (the darkest shades) look fine and so do the highlights (the brightest, near white shades), so I only need to adjust the "midtones". Again, removing the magenta, so sliding the Magenta/Green more towards the green. I also added a bit of blue just to add more of a "cool" tint. Here's the settings I used:

Here's another gif that could benefit from a "Color Balance" layer:

As you can see, the before gif is very colorful, but it's very dull. I can add a color balance layer to give it more depth. The shadows aren't as intense, so I want to add more. I'm only editing the "Shadows" by sliding the first set of colors more towards the red, since my gif is more "cool" (blues, greens) adding red will darken it and add more saturation without turning my gif overly blue. I also add a bit green and yellow to make the shadow more neutral as opposed to just adding a dark red. Here’s my gif now:

And here's the settings:

4. The other way you can balance colors is by using the "Channel Mixer". It may seem super complex, but think of it the same as the color balance, either you add or remove tones from the main colors of the gif. I only use this with gifs that have major lighting issues (lol). Here's my before gif:

and after using the channel mixer:

Huge difference right? Now, you don't always have to use this because some scenes have that lighting and we don't really have to change it and make it "normal". Imagine they're in a photography red room, we definitely don't need to try to make it normal. If they're in a club with neon green lights, same thing we don't need to make it normal. But if it simply needs major adjusting, this is how to do it. Using the guidelines from the "Color Balance" from above, take a look at your gif and see what tint is too much. For this gif, it's definitely too yellow / orange.

To make things easier, what color was with the yellow on the color balance layer? Blue, so basically if I want less yellow, I need to add more blue. That's very surface level, but that will help you to understand for an easy start.

So I want more "Blue" so I need to go to the blue channel and add more blue into the reds and greens. Here are my settings:

Now my gif:

It's still a bit off, as you can tell it's a bit too peachy instead of a more "natural" tan / beige tone. So I want to go into the red channel and drag the red down until the tint is a bit more natural. Here's my settings:

and my before and after gif:

As you can see it's much more neutralized and will be much easier to edit in the next steps.

5. Next is "Selective Color", my personal fave. You can really do a lot with this layer, you can remove colors, change colors and make colors really pop. I only really ever make "natural" looking gifs, so besides the previous edits, I don't do pale, or grayscale gifs at all. So what I'm going for is really vibrant, saturated gifs but still natural looking.

Here's my before:

As you can see in my before gif, there's a lot of popping color. The red in the scarf and the bits of blue/cyan in his jacket and in the background. You can use the selective color layer to target just these colors to really make them stand out. To add more red into her scarf, in the "Red" color, I want to add more red by sliding the first set towards the red side. I also want to add a bit of magenta so the scarf is more of a blood red, instead of a brownish red. Then I want to add a bit of yellow to really add some saturated color. Red is a bit tricky because nine times out of ten, it will also alter skin tones too. Just be mindful of that, and you can still make reds pop. If you do get too much pink in the skin, just go to the "Magenta" color and play around with the settings to neutralize the skin (most often by sliding the magenta to a negative and the yellow to a positive number). Here are my settings:

For that cyan, I want to go to the "Cyan" color and with cyans and blue I always slide both the first and last set of colors. I literally never want to go with the green-ish blue that cyan leans to, I want more of a super saturated baby blue, so if I add cyan, I will always add a bit of blue. So, I will slide the first row (cyan) into a positive number to target the cyan tone, then I'll also slide the second to last row (Yellow) into a negative number to add more blue, and less yellow (and less green) to get a more "true" blue color. Here's my settings:

and my before:

and after only editing the reds and cyans:

You can add more or keep it more mild. This is only two colors, so imagine what you can do with all of the colors available in the selective color layer. 

5. A super important step when you're using "Selective Color" is the white and black color. I always my color pop selective color (from above) and a "Selective Color - Black" and "Selective Color - White", which ofc you can do on the same layer, but I like the option to lower the opacity individually. For me personally, I like slightly darker shadows and over the top bright white highlights. I also like to further tweak them while I'm there.

So to start, "Selective Color - Blacks". If your gif has a shadow that is too "one color" you can use the black color to balance that out. So for example this gif:

and the after:

You can see in the before that the shadows are too red, too warm. To remove that, I want to go to the "Black" color. So taking what we learned in the color balance layers, the basic tones are: red + cyan, green + magenta and blue + yellow (so to get less red, add more cyan, to get more green, remove magenta). So since my shadows are too red, I want to slide the cyan color to a positive number (thus "adding" cyan). Doing so might alter the color too much in another direction, so if I add too much cyan, it might be overly green, so I need to add magenta, which oops, caused it to be a bit blue, so I need to add a bit of yellow. I almost always slide the top three sliders to a positive number to achieve and almost neutral, no color black, which is why these settings have a bit of everything:

Now, the last slider, the black, basically either adds black, or removes it. Since we're on the black slider, we don't want to remove any black, or it will go white. Since I like my dark colors super dark, I will add black by sliding it to a positive number. Here's my settings:

Adding only a little bit, +4. I usually stick to below +10 because it can easily muddy and ruin your gif.

6. Now "Selective Color - Whites". The same concept of the black color from above, but now the bright, near to white or whites in your gif. I love adding a lot of white to my gifs to make things like the little sparkle in eyes pop, or white backgrounds really bright and a lot of contrast. I don't usually mess with the top three sliders unless there's a lot of color in my white. I mostly change the last slider, the black to a large negative number (so removing black to make white). Here's my before gif:

and after white:

See how it just makes the highlights really pop? You can really see the it in her eyes, around the strands of hair and in the sun spots in the background. You can't always get this look by adding a ton of white because you can over do it. I mostly do this on gifs that don't have a ton of highlight or on lighter skin tones because you just blend the lighter (but not white) tones to much. But for this gif, I can and did, so here are my settings:

And for good measure a before black and white selective color:

And a ton of black and white:

And my settings:

7. Now the last step is up to you, I usually do a mix of the three or just one of the three. I will show you each, but I always finish my gifs off with either a "Brightness/Contrast" layer if my gif is a bit lackluster, a "Levels" if I want an even, overall boost (my usual end) or an "Exposure" if I have enough contrast but want a more bright look.

Don't worry if this step washes out the skintone of poc gifs, I have a very, very last step that will fix that (below the next step).

If your gif isn't as bright or vibrant as you'd like, add a "Brightness/Contrast" layer. As a rule of thumb, I always add to both, but focus on one, that way you don't get that super bright yellow look. So don't add 50+ to both, add a bit to contrast and a lot to brightness, or vice versa. So my settings are simply: Brightness + 18 with Contrast +5

Before:

After:

Now if you're gif has enough black and contrast in the dark shades, but is too dark overall, use an "Exposure" layer. For this gif, the dark hair and jacket are pretty much pure black, but my gif is too dark. And exposure layer is pretty much: exposure - add or remove contrast, offset - add or remove black and gamma correction - add more remove brightness. So I want to add to the gamma buy sliding more towards the right. It will almost always wash out your gif, so don't go wild. Then slide the exposure to the right to add a bit of contrast. Incase your gif does get washed out on the black tones, just slide the offset to the left to add more. Here are my settings:

Before:

And after:

And lastly, if your gif is pretty good contrast wise, has an okay brightness but you want to boost everything without losing much in terms of color and lighting, use a "Levels" layer. About 85% of my gifs end with a levels layer because I personally love the look it gives. Here's my gif:

and after a levels layer:

The before wasn't too bad, but I definitely want more brightness but I don't want to add to much contrast or just wash out my gif with light. So adding a levels layer and moving the first slider the the left and the middle and last slider to the left will work perfectly. The last slider is the "shadows", the middle is the "midtones" and the far right slider is the "highlights". So adding more shadows to the gif will add more contrast to the dark tones and blacks, adding more highlights will add contrast to the lighter and white shades and the middle will either lighten or darken your gif without adding too much contrast.

I always edit in this order: slide the middle to the left until the brightness I want is reached, then slide the last slider towards the left to add a bit of contrast if the brightness is dull, then slide the first slider towards the right to add more black. Don't go wild, but also don't be afraid to slide them over a good amount. Here's my settings:

Here’s a gif from earlier that also needed a levels layer, the before:

And after:

And the settings I used for that one:

8. The very last step is to even out washed out skintones. This is especially important for this style of gif (as opposed to pale style gifs where the look is still poc skintones, just pale). I don't want a washed out look, because there's no need for it, no reason in my "natural" colored gifs. So to fix this, I always add this layer with these settings and I just lower/raise the opacity as needed.

Since most skintones are mostly affected by the reds (for example add a hue/saturation layer, go to the red color and change one of the settings to see how much it messes with skintones), I only edit the "Red" color. Here are my settings:

my washed out gifs:

now my more true-to-tone gifs:

9. As for saving, I only ever use 0.05 on the frame delay except for gifs with fast moving objects (like the snow and hair blowing gifs I used for my main previews) and these save settings.

Another note, I always use 1080 videos, very rarely do I go with 720 and even then it’s always for music videos or movie/tv trailers downloaded from Youtube.

That's the end of my tutorial! I really hope you've learned something and of course all of this is for you to apply to your own style. If you don't like super crispy highlights, don't add so much white or if you want gifs that aren't over the top bright, I hope I've left you with enough tips that have you confident to play with settings and change things up and still love the gifs you end up with.

If you have any questions or need any help, please let me know! I don't mind at all. If you want more in-depth tutorials on specific layers, I do have some on almost all of the things I wrote about, but they are super old so I can update those if needed.

I’m breaking this down into two parts: 1. Setting up and creating your gifs and 2. creating the actual transition part.

1. Guide to this tutorial

We’re going to be working with multiple smart objects and documents at once so I want to create a little keyword guide.

“small” gifs refer to your smaller gifs

“big” gifs refer to your bigger gifs

panel/document/canvas I use somewhat interchangeably here but they refer to the document where you will be placing both your small and big gifs

click on any images that are blurry so that you can view the HQ version! 

1.1 Setting yourself up 

The first thing to do is decide how many gifs you want to do. Standard gif width sizes for tumblr are 540px for one gif, 268px for two gifs and 177/178/177px for 3 gifs. You can do more than this, but make sure that you’re calculating in the gutter between gifs (4 px). 

Height is completely up to you, but take into consideration that the upload limit is 10mb! 

For my ROTK set, I did 177/178/177 x 150 which gave me a canvas size of 540x458. For my Sam set, I chose a different layout where I had four gifs of 268x150 and 3 gifs of 177/178/177 giving me the same canvas size. 

(150 x three rows = 450 + 4 px for gutter x 3 = 458)

Now that you have your sizes, you’ll know how many gifs you want to do depending on how many panels. For my ROTK set I wanted to do five panels so I needed 45 small gifs and five big gifs. 

The last thing I do before I start creating the gifs is to set up a new document for each panel with the larger dimension. 

File -> New -> this dialog (click on image for HQ) 

1.2 Creating your smaller gifs 

This is the most time intensive part as you will be creating individual gifs for each panel. You need to make sure that each of these gifs is the exact same amount of frames. I usually do between 30-40 frames.

Load your screencaps/movie and crop, resize and sharpen it. (shameless plug for my action pack here) and convert to smart object if it’s not already!!

I also like to name my gifs as either side (177 px) or middle (178 px) 

If you prefer you can also color your gif now. For color sets I like to color them once I have them all on the same canvas but that’s really just a personal preference there is no right or wrong way. 

!! YOUR GIFS NEED TO BE IN SMART OBJECT FORMAT FOR THE NEXT STEP !!

We’re now going to drag the gif onto the corresponding panel document (still in smart object form)

Once the gif is on the document I like to go ahead and create timeline and delete the base layer.

1.3 Aligning your gifs

Move the gif to the part of the canvas you want it be by selecting command + a and then command + v. This allows you to accurately place your gif using these buttons:

Now repeat this process until each of your panels are filled: (for the sake of time I just used 3 gifs that aren’t colored yet hp set coming soon tho ayeee)  

If you didn’t color your gifs earlier, color them now and then select each of your gifs and create one smart object by selecting all layers -> right click -> convert to smart object and name this layer “small” or something along those lines

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND SAVING AFTER YOU’VE COLORED AND BEFORE IT’S A SMART OBJECT just in case 

1.4 Creating your bigger gifs

Load the screencaps for your bigger gif. Make sure that it is the exact same amount of frames as the smaller gifs. 

You’re going to crop it to the size of your documents so 540 x the height you’ve chosen. DO NOT RESIZE IT. 

Click on VIEW -> NEW GUIDE LAYOUT

This dialog set is going to pop up - enter in how many rows and how many columns you want as well as the gutter size you’ve decided on (the image has 2 px on it but 4 px is the standard tumblr size)

A layout guide will appear that demarcates where you need to crop.

Remember to change your cropping size if you’re doing 177/178 for the middle column. 

Now crop out each section then resize it to the correct size, sharpen it and create a smart object. 

Drag this gif to the panel you want and position it in the correct place using command + a and command + v. 

Go back to larger gif document and reverse your steps until you have the guide layout. 

Crop the next part of the gif and repeat the above steps until your panel now has all of the larger gif on it. 

For coloring the larger panel, I like to resize it into the correct size on the original and color it separately and then drag the coloring group onto the panel with the smaller and larger gifs. 

Once all of the pieces of the larger gif are in the correct place and your coloring group is there, select the them and create a smart object.

You should now have two smart objects, one of the smaller gifs and one of the larger gif. 

2. Fade transition

Now for the transition! 

Duplicate your “big” layer so that you have a “big”, a “big copy” and a “small”

You’re going to drag your “small” layer onto the same line as your “big” layer, creating a video group. 

Then drag your “big copy” layer onto the same line but behind your “small” layer.

Your layers panel should look like this:

Click on this button in timeline here, and select cross fade. The amount of seconds you want to choose is up to you.

I did .3 seconds for my ROTK set which created 6 transition layers which I quite liked but it is really up to personal preference here!

Now drag the cross fade onto both the start and the end of the “small” layer. 

I find this is a good time to check my gif and make sure that everything looks the way I want it to and that the fade transition is smooth. 

The next few steps are crucial to getting the fade to actually stay in your gif so although it’s waaaay different than how I usually export gifs so stay with me.

Instead of converting back to frames and setting your timing you’re going to go directly to export for web and make sure you have the transparency boxes checked (CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HQ):

note: it might take a long long long time for the save for web dialog box to pop up so don’t worry it’s not you

!!!note 2: as of may 1st due to the new update make sure to uncheck "interlaced"!!!!

Save and then open that gif file you just created. Play it just to make sure that the fade transition is the way that you want it to be. 

The key to creating the smooth transition effect is that we will actually be deleting some of the big gif so that the actual “beginning” of the big gif starts after the smaller gifs, even though that’s not the beginning of the actual file. 

(this is kinda hard to explain I’m sorry!!!)

What you’re going to do is delete the first 10-20 frames of the first “big” gif and then delete the frames that you left in the first “big” gif from the back of the second “big” gif. 

So for this set I’m deleting the first 20 frames:

and now I need to delete the remaining frames between the “start” of the big gif and the first transition. The easiest way to do this is go find the first transition frame of the second transition - where the small gifs transition back into the big gif. Click through the frames until the you see where they start to fade. 

Once you’ve found that frame, count forward the amount of frames you deleted in the beginning. COUNT INCLUDING THE FIRST TRANSITION FRAME. 

Now delete the frames that come after your counted ones. The reason I count out 20 instead of 19 (or whatever you number is) is so that I can double check myself. My 20th frame (so frame 63) should be the exact same as frame 1 (the first frame in the whole gif).

This creates the effect that the gif never actually ends! 

a colored version:

Make sure that you then flatten your frames to layers and delete your excess layers and set the timing to 0.05! 

Finally (I promise) your gif is ready to be exported and uploaded to tumblr!

note: because you deleted a decent amount of frames your gif should be under 10 mb. If you’re struggling with the size limit, either cut down the original amount of frames or cut down the duration of the fade. 

(now repeat this process for each of your panels)

I really hope this was somewhat easy to follow and please message me if you have any questions or run in to any problems! 

1. First, download the 177 x 315 px template here. [or here to get a real size print screen template so you can resize the way you want - it’s way heavier].

2. When you open it, you’ll have these following layers inside the folder to edit. I recommend you to edit this psd having the Timeline activated with frame animation option showing.

Their names are already indicating what they are doing, although the “Optional - Gradient” it’s something Spotify have, I didn’t used this on my previous gifsets [x, x].

Anyway, you have the “Track Name” folder, which has 3 layers that make the words move when they doesn’t fit the space (and I also show them going back and forth), but you may delete all the frames except the first one if your track name doesn’t need to move. Plus, the “READ IT AND HIDE IT LATER” folder it’s just a little note about how to make the track name moves in case you need it, but I’ll explain here shortly in the end.

3. Now, I recommed you to convert your frame animation into Video Timeline, especially if you have an animation for your track name. For this, click on the corner icon aside “Forever” and will look like this:

4. Already on your gif file, you’ll have to crop your gif with the Ratio 177 x 315, resize the file to Width: 177 px and to Height: 315 px and transform it into Video Timeline as well. Then, you may grab the template file out of the editor, leaving above the gif file, and drag the “Spotify Template by @novacane” folder inside the gif file like this:

5. Make sure to fit the template perfectly on the file with the guidelines Photoshop has. If your PS version doesn’t have it, you can drag the template folder with the background (select both) and then delete the background now in your gif file. Also, duplicate the template folder too so you can make it lasts the whole gif (I think it’s more practical to duplicate than to change all the components times).

And done! ;) I hope this was useful and understandable!

P.S.: To make the Track Name moves you basically need to delete all the layers inside the “Track Name” folder except the first one, that you’ll edit. For each letter you’ll need to add that doesn't fit in the track name space, you’ll duplicate the text layer and then you’ll remove the first letter and add another one at the end (also hide the layers of text you just made so that it doesn't get messy). When you finish it, duplicate the first frame (the icon next to the trash one) and and go select the next text layer to show. Create frames and show layers until you finish the whole name and then create frames to show the text layers in the reverse order, so you can create the going back and forth effect. The frames’ time is already the way I think is appropriate, but change it if necessary.