#giffing tutorial

STEP ONE: MAKING YOUR GIF

choose your footage and plug it into your desired software of choice! i use photoshop for this so i can only attest to the efficacy of these methods in that context

as for shot selection, you could feasibly choose anything. however, i prefer shots without too much movement in them - makes it look more like a home video.

because of the heavy amount of colors and filters, i'd recommend a gif somewhere around the 40-50 frames! but of course you can play around.

oh i also set the frame delay to 0.08 seconds. this is slower than most gifmakers tend to set theirs, but it makes it run buttery smooth imo.

STEP TWO: MAKING THE COLORING

here's where we get vhs specific. if you're unfamiliar with vhs footage, i recommend clicking through this youtube playlist! if you're not interested in the coloring, skip to step three (smart object fuckery + filters)

now while making a set i tend to choose some primary colors for my gifs. in the gifset i linked above, i chose to work with blue and orange-y yellow. in some of the other gifs i'll be using as examples (from an unfinished set) i chose green and yellow.

to create the above coloring i generally use these steps:

1) curves

i'm a maniac so i use the same curves layer to initially edit the luminosity AND colors of my gifs. the purpose of this layer is to edit brightness/contrast like i normally would and already start the process of changing the colors a little bit. this is my curves layer for the blue house gif:

to make the gif go from the left image to the right image:

as you can see i used the brightening curves to make the footage a whole lot lighter. i also increased the reds to get rid of the cyan tint a lot of blue footage has, slightly increased the blues, and once again decreased the greens to get rid of any cyan. this does make the blue hue a bit more purple, which is a nice bonus!

as for the gif of the boy, that one's a little harder to show a before and after for, but i'lls how the curves for good measure:

the original shot was already quite bright so i only edited the brightness a litttle bit. because i knew i wanted the gif to be green and yellow, i increased the greens, decreased the reds (except in the shadows), and decreased the blues (to get yellow)

2) channel mixer

now the channel mixer layer takes a little getting used to so i recommend experimenting. ALWAYS USE THIS LAYER ON THE COLOR BLENDING MODE for a more even result.

i use channel mixers to sort of... unify the colors a bit more. for the house gif, for example, i increased the blue channel to +110% blue, but decreased the blue in the red (-12%) to retain the yellow in the window.

if you want me to explain this more in depth, send an ask! it'll be kinda longwinded though

before / after of the boy gif with curves/channel mixer.

3) levels

this is where it starts looking more vhs-y! vhs footage has light shadows and dark highlights.

first, set your levels layer to luminosity blending mode to retain your beautiful colors.

then, crunch the hell out of your gif to make it very... mid.

this may feel a little wrong at first but i prommy it'll look okay at the end. a before/after for the boy:

now that's starting to look familiar right?

4) color fill/gradient map

because i want to unify my colors/make sure my gif is saturated, i usually add either a color fill or gradient map layer. in the case of the house, i chose to go with a dark blue color fill:

because the coloring of the boy gif was a little more complex, i decided to go with a brown to green gradient map.

this will make the shadows yellow, and the highlights green.

BOTH THESE LAYERS ARE SET TO OVERLAY. i usually fiddle with the opacity of them until i like it, but it's anywhere from 7% - 17% depending on what i feel like that day

5) curves (again)

this layer is probably useless but i do it anyway to make myself feel better. this is just a regular curse layer to up the brightness a tiiiiny bit and amke sure everything's clear. also it helps counteract the darkness your overlay color will add in.

6) color balance

this is my most subtle layer so i won't be able to show before and after but i fiddle with the color distribution a little until i'm satisfied. set this layer to color blending 'cause that's what you wanna affect!

i decided i wanted the house gif shadows to be a little more purple, for example, so i added in red (+3), magenta (-1) and blue (+1). etc etc. do what feels good!

STEP THREE: SMART OBJECT FUCKERY AND FILTERS

OKAY that was a lot. sorry or you're welcome. but good news: now's the fun part. convert your animation to a timeline, then select both your coloring and gif layers, right click, and select convert to smart object.

now that your gif's a smart object, i usually crop it. i tend make vhs aes gifs a 4:3 ratio (so 540 x 405 px) because that's what vhs footage was usually recorded as! crop your gif, resize, and then we can continue.

1) color bleeding

vhs footage usually bleeds its colors - this manifests as a short of... weird subtle halo around any object. the way to recreate this in photoshop is to duplicate your smart object.

set your copied smart object to color blending. now move it to the side a couple of pixels (i usually do around 5px, but you do you!)

as you can see, the tree and chimney (and everything else but less prominently) have a yellow shadow to them. this is exactly what we want!

2) filters

now's the time to add your filters and make it look like shit (but on purpose!) first, select both smart objects and convert to smart object again. this will ensure the filters apply to all layers evenly.

i use the following filters:

unsharp mask (amt 35%, radius 4px) - this will subtly add some sharpening but only on the edges of objects

add noise (amt 7.5%, distr. uniform, not monochromatic) - this will add the signature vhs grain.

box blur (2px) - i edit this to be 75% opacity with the little arrows to the right, just to make sure you can still make SOMETHING out when you're looking at the gif. MAKE SURE THIS FILTER IS ON TOP OF YOUR NOISE FILTER. tumblr will kill your gif otherwise

4) ONE LAST THING

usually at this point i'm not happy with either the saturation or levels. (usually the levels). so on top of your smart object, add another saturation or levels layer and fuck around!

in the case of the house gif, i thought it was too bright still so i set my output levels to 13 and 216. for the boy, i thought the shadows were too dark, so i set my shadow output to 11.

BEFORE & AFTER:

1. RENAME CAPS:

First things first. Rename all of your caps that you will be using for a gif to have the prefix _a_ on your computer. Select all and right-click on the FIRST file and select Rename (windows) and type _a_. Windows will add the numbers.

For most gifs, try not to have more than 60 frames as it will make the gif too large to upload to Tumblr. I usually aim for 45-50 frames max for most of my gifs.

2. IMPORT FRAME #1:

Drag and Drop _a_ (1).png into Photopea. Rename the layer from Background to _a_ (1)

3. IMPORT IMAGES:

Select all the rest of your images from the folder on your computer, and drag and drop ON TOP OF the image (not the layers section). Make sure the file you grab to drag/drop is the next one in the sequence (so _a_ (2).png in this case. Otherwise they will be out of order. If you do it right, you will see the layers section on the right get populated with your caps in reverse order, with 1 at the bottom and the last one at the top.

4. RASTERIZE:

Next, select all of the layers (on the right, by holding CTRL and clicking on each layer), go to Layer > Rasterize. They are currently Smart Layers, and if you keep them this way the sharpening will not apply (for some reason, I have no idea why that is)

5. CROP:

Next, crop your gif. This tool is on the left menu. You do not have to have all the layers selected for this, it will crop all layers together. Move the blue lines at the edges until the frame is cropped how you like. Be mindful of the character moving in other frames; you may want to check your other layers to make sure nothing important gets cropped off in another frame. Once the blue lines are where you want them, click the checkmark at the top right to finish the crop.

6. RESIZE:

Resize your gif so that it is 540 pixels wide. Go to Image > Image Size in the top menu. Make sure you choose "Bicubic Sharper" as the resample mode. Once this is done, you will see your image is tiny, so go to the Zoom tool (on the left menu, the magnifying glass near the bottom) and select Fit the Area at the top of the screen so you can see what you are doing.

7. SHARPEN:

Next is sharpen. Select all your layers again (on the right), then go to the top menu: Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen. The default settings here are for 150%, and that is good for most things.

8. ADJUSTMENTS

This is the tricky part. You now need to adjust the brightness, contrast, exposure, color balance, and saturation. This will vary from gif to gif how much to adjust these values. I will show how I adjusted this one and you can apply that to whatever gif you are making.

For starters, since this show is SO DARK, you will need to brighten it. There are many ways to do this, but I found the method that works best for me is adjusting the Levels.

First off, in order to make adjustments, make sure you scroll all the way to the top of your Layers panel and make sure only the TOP LAYER is selected. Otherwise the adjustments will only be applied to whatever is BELOW the selected layer. You want all of them.

8a. ADJUST LEVELS

Next, go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer to pull up all your adjustments. For this first example we will use Levels, which is the second from the top.

You will see a histogram like this one:

This is a lot of information about the image, but pay attention to where the curve starts and stops. On the left, you see a "0". That is your dark point. This image is slightly washed out so I need to move that adjustment to the right so that the little square is just below where the curve starts. The third number is "255" and this is your bright point. The images are very dark so most of the graph is shifted to the left (dark) so in order to brighten, move the third square (the white one) so that the second square (grey one) is just at the edge of where the curve drops off on the right.

You can now see the numbers changed. Moving the first dark square will enhance your contrast, and moving the THIRD square will enhance your brightness. It is usually not necessary to move the second square, but you can experiment with this by moving things around and seeing how it affects your image. After this, it may be necessary to also increase the Exposure and Brightness if it is still not bright enough, but most of that can be done here.

8b. ADJUST COLOR BALANCE

Again go to your Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Color Balance to get this tool. This is a neat one with A LOT of variables, so play around with it to get the colors to look how you want. A lot of the raw video tends to have a bluish or greenish cast to it, so you just move the sliders to get rid of the cast and make the colors look how they are SUPPOSED to.

In this case there is a very slight greenish cast to the pictures so I will adjust that slider to compensate. The Range (at the top) you can select Shadows, Midtones, or Highlights, depending on where the color cast is located. Usually I stick to Shadows but sometimes will use Midtones if the color cast is really bad. Make sure Preserve Luminosity is checked.

8c: ADJUST SATURATION

Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation. This will brighten up your colors. This tool is VERY COOL in that you can select color families to selectively increase or decrease the saturation of. Under Range you can choose Master, which is all colors, or choose only Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue or Magenta. The slider at the very bottom (when a single color is selected) allows you to set the range of colors to. I chose Master and increased the saturation of all colors, but be careful as this can make skintones look VERY orange. So select other colors in the Range to adjust single colors only.

With this tool you can also change the HUE (which is changing the overall colors to a different color, like shifting all the reds to orange) and Lightness (which may or may not be necessary if you did the Levels correctly)

If you need to go back and change something in your adjustment layers, you can do so by clicking on the white box in the Layers section next to whatever you need to adjust.

There are many other Adjustment Layers you can play with, so have fun and experiment!

9. ADD YOUR WATERMARK AND TEXT

Next, you can add a watermark if you have a premade file, by dragging and dropping it on the image. Then move it around to where you want it, resize it if needed, and change the opacity if it is too bright. Make sure this layer is the TOP layer.

To add text (for subtitles or effects) simply click on the Text icon in the left menu (the T) and click anywhere on the image and start typing. You can change the font, color, size, and style in the menu on the top. Move the text around by using the Select tool (arrow on the left) Again make sure this is the TOP LAYER so that it will be present over the entire gif.

10: EXPORT YOUR GIF

File > Export as > GIF

A pop up dialog will appear and you can change some settings here if you want. I usually don't. Pay close attention to the filesize (at the bottom) and make sure it is under 10mb. Keep the quality at 100%. And most importantly MAKE SURE DITHER is checked! This will prevent compression artifacts from ruining your gif.

Save the file to your computer and VIOLA! Gif!

Step 1:

Open photoshop, click file > import video frames to layers

Use the cursors to trim the part you want to gif, make sure you have “make frame animation” selected

Step 2: 

Group all of the frames you want to be a part of your gif. Click your first layer then crtl+shift+click your last layer 

Step 3:

Delete the frames and layers you don’t want to be a part of your gif. Select the layers and click the little trash can at the very bottom of your layer panel. Do the same in your timeline

Step 4:

Click the hamburger stack at the right hand side of your timeline then click “select all frames”

Click one of the little arrows on one of your frames and change the speed to 0.05

Step 5:

Change the size of your canvas. Tumblr has specific dimensions for gifs. For 1 column gifs, the width should be 540px, for 2 column gifs the width should be 268px, and for three column gifs the width should be 177px on the outside gifs and 178px for the middle gifs.

My favorite dimensions are 540px by 340px but you can mess around with the height. The height of the gif does not matter

Step 6:

Select your group then go to edit > free transform. Use free transform to adjust your frames to fit your new canvas size

Step 7:

Click the hamburger stack and select all frames. Ungroup your layers by right clicking your group then “ungroup layers”.  On the bottom left side of your timeline, click the little hamburger stack with a line through it to covert your timeline to frame animation. Just make sure all of your frames and layers are selected when you turn your timeline into frame animation

Step 8:

Select all of your layers and right click > “covert to smart object”

Your work space should look like this

Step 9: 

The coloring! Click the little folder at the very bottom of your layers panel

Step 10:

Click the adjustment layers option and select “Channel mixer”.  

I really like channel mixer for scenes that are really blue and really yellow. It’s a quick way to reverse those filters. Channel Mixer works with contrasting colors. So, your blues go yellow, your greens go purple and your reds go blue. I highly recommend this tutorial by @zoyanazyalensky​​​ . It is amazing and they explain channel mixer worlds better than I ever could lol

For my gif, it’s really blue, so I go to the blue channel and bring the blue blues down a little

My gif starts going a little bit green so I open the green channel and bring the green greens down a little bit

I just messed with the blue and green mixer until I was happy with it. My channel mixer settings ended up looking like this

Step 11:

Click the adjustments layer option and select "Brightness/Contrast”

These are my brightness and contrast settings. Set these to whatever works best for your gif. Be careful not to brighten too much because your gif can go a bit grainy if you do

Step 12: 

Click the adjustments layer option and select “Color Balance”

I love color balance. You can adjust a lot with it and it’s a great adjustment layer. For every gif, I start with midtones. For blue gifs like this one, I slide all of the sliders to the right and staircase them. There isn’t a specific number I set them to since every gif is different so I just slide them until I’m happy with them.

Next, click the drop down menu that says “midtones” and select “shadows”. For shadows, I also slide them just a little bit to the right.

Next, click the drop down menu and click “highlights”. Again, just move those a little bit to the right.

This is what mine looks like

For gifs that are more yellow, you’ll likely slide your sliders to the left instead of the right!! 

This is what my gif looks like with Channel Mixer, Brightness/Contrast, and Color Balance

Step 13:

Click the adjustments layer option and select “Selective Color”

Selective color is great because it allows you to fine tune individual colors within your gif rather than changing the entire color of it. Selective color is really helpful when it comes to skin tones as well. There isn’t a specific way I do this lol I just slide the sliders left and right until I like what it looks like lol

This is what mine looks like

I almost allows brings the white blacks all the way to -100 and have the black blacks set to +1 to +3

Step 14:

Click the adjustments layer option and select "Vibrance”. I just upped the vibrance and saturation a bit since Jason’s skin was looking a little washed out.

This is what mine look like

Step 15:

Add your sharpening!! Click your smart object then go to filter > sharpen > smart sharpen. I’m using sharpening by @anya-chalotra​​​ but I usually set the reduce noise to 7

Step 16:

Export!! Go to file > export > save for web

Make sure your gif is under 10mb (red circle) because if it’s over 10, it won’t play on Tumblr.

Make sure your colors are set to 256 and your dither is 100% (green circle), the quality is set to “bicubic” (blue circle), and the looping is set to forever (pink circle). The yellow circle are my other settings. You can play around with those but I find adaptive and diffusion work best in most cases!!

Step 17:

Photoshop will export your gif with a speed of 0.07 so now you need to fix that. Once your gif is saved, open your gif in Photoshop again. Select all of your frames and change the speed to 0.05. Then export it like above and save!!

And that’s it!! I hope this was at least somewhat helpful!! If you have any questions, feel free to send me an ask!!

Here are some other gifs I’ve done following these same steps

i do most of my process through actions; of which i have several for different gif dimensions ie 540 width (typically for fancams where i keep the width of the file the same but change the height), 540 height (which i use the most for gifs like the above), and 850 height which i use for my sets that have side by side gifs like my pinned

actions make the beginning of making a gif a lot faster and especially save time when you're rushing to make comeback gifs lmao

after i've converted to the video timeline and selected all of my frames and converted them to a smart object, i apply userdramas's camera raw filter action which can help gifs look higher quality and create the illusion of skin texture when there isn't any

after this i convert the layer into a smart object again and apply my sharpening as follows (partly from anyataylorjoy's action pack)

smart sharpen 1:

smart sharpen 2:

smart sharpen 3: (this one is optional)

smart sharpen 2 duplicated

gaussian blur:

and i click this button on the far right to change the opacity of the blur (usually i set it around 10-30)

it may look funky but noise at the end will always fix it :p

after i sharpen i start on coloring!

my coloring process starts with editing values with curves, brightness & contrast, and sometimes levels

this helps to achieve the high contrast look i really like on my gifs and below are my settings for this specific set

i find that the marker in the center of the curves graph can often help darken skin tones if the subject appears too light

after i have my values down i move on to the actual colors

i start with adding a selective color layer; adjusting the red values, followed by yellow, then black, white, and any other colors i would want prominent in the gif

for example, with this set i wanted the blues to look really nice so i increased the cyans and decreased the yellows to my liking

changing the black values adds to the dimension i like in my gifs; these are my settings

forgot magenta whoops

next i add a hue/sat layer where i mess with the red and yellow values which often adds extra help to skin tones (i also recently started using hue/sat on colors like the blues here)

now these gifs didn't need it thankfully, but if needed i will also do color balance and channel mixer layers

after all my coloring and sharpening is done and i'm satisfied with how a gif looks i will convert all layers to a smart object and add noise (typically 1.5-3)

then the gif is done and i save it! these are my save settings

and that's how i turn this

into this!

hope y'all enjoyed and found this helpful and thank you again for 500<3333

SOFTWARE

firstly, i have a mac and use photoshop cc 2022 to make my gifs. to screencap i use mpv player. someone made a really good tutorial on how to download mpv player so i’ll link that here - x. 

also i use qbitt*rrent to open t*rrent files so you’re gonna want to download that as well if you’re using t*rrent files. 

btw for newer versions of photoshop you can’t access the smart object timeline without an action so you’ll have to download this - x. to load an action into photoshop go to window > action and then the actions should pop up next to your history, then you have to press the four horizontal lines next to the arrows (that’s if yours is set up like mine lol) and press on load actions and just select the action you downloaded from me which should be in your downloads and press open and it should appear in your actions section !! 

DOWNLOADING THE MEDIA

firstly, you’re gonna wanna download everything in 1080p if possible as this will help to keep the highest possible quality for your finished gif !! now as to where to download media:

- tv shows and most movies: t*rrent from rar.bg with 1080p files with a x264 codec (don’t download x265 as you won’t be able to screencap properly) i try to go for bluray or amazon t*rrents as they tend to have the best quality and most seeders. individual episodes should be around 2-4 GB so full seasons can be anywhere up to 70GB if they’re in 1080p. as for movies i tend to go for files around 10GB, anything under 2GB doesn’t tend to have the best possible quality even if it’s listed as 1080p. 

- other movies: some movies, particular older ones aren’t on rar.bg or have literally no seeders so i go to yify. unfortunately the quality isn’t as good as it would be if i downloaded it from rar.bg as the file sizes are made to be as small as possible but hey ho sometimes its the best we can get. 

- youtube/twitch videos: 4k video downloader is the best application to use, you do have to download it as software though and you can only do 5 downloads per content creator account with the free version (which i have now run out of :/). so atm i'm using loader.to, for some reason it increases the saturation of the video a little bit but i don’t really mind that cause it’s a lot easier to fix and work with over saturation than under saturation. 

SCREENCAPPING

open the file in mpv player

find the section you want to gif (i tend to start a little before said section starts so i can cut it down later)

to start screencapping press option + s (for mac) and then it should start screencapping really slowly but hang on in there it’ll get there. most of my gifs tend to be anywhere between 30-75 frames (per gif) depending on the sizing of my gif and the quality + colouring i’m using. 

to stop screencapping just press option + s again. and now you have successfully created your screencaps. 

IMPORTING SCREENCAPS INTO PHOTOSHOP 

file > scripts > load files into stack 

2. browse then use command + a to select all screencaps in that folder then press open then once you get to this (photo below) you can press okay and photoshop will start loading your screencaps in !!

3. your files should now have imported into the bottom far right in layers 

PUTTING SCREENCAPS INTO TIMELINE

firstly go to window > timeline 

which should then create something like this at the bottom of your screen:

so that’s your timeline ^^. and then for putting the screencaps into timeline: i’ve actually made an action for this so i haven’t done this manually for a while lmfao but this is essentially what it does if i were to do it manually:

click on ‘create frame animation’ which should then create this: 

2. command + a on your screencaps in layers to select all of them at once then click on the little four horizontal lines to the immediate left of the layers and press ‘make frames from layers’. 

4. then command + a and select all your frames in timeline

5. then press ‘flatten frames into layers’ which is right under ‘make frames from layers’. this should then create layers titled as ‘frames’ in your layers section right above your original screencaps. i then put all my frames into a group and delete the original screencaps to save storage space. 

6. make sure to reverse your frames so that the gif isn’t backwards - again command + a and select all your frames in the timeline then click on the four small horizontal lines and press ‘reverse frames’. 

*this is future alice coming back and realising that i never cut down the amount of frames for my gif lmfao *facepalm*. so yes after you’ve done this or set your frame delay, either cut down and delete some of your frames from the timeline and/or copy and paste them in another document and repeat the giffing process for each one. now remember that you can drag your colouring from one document to the other so you don’t have to redo your colouring on each one (alas i did not know this when i first started gifmaking 💀 ). 

for bigger gifs i tend to use 35-50 frames and up to 75 for smaller sized gifs. 

SETTING FRAME DELAY

for most of my gifs i use frame delay 0.05, but occasionally 0.04 or 0.06 depending on the gif. anything slower will end up reducing your gif quality and anything faster tends to look a bit fast imo. 

again you’re going to want to command + a and select all of your frames in the timeline and then click on the 0 sec right underneath the frame icon. then press other because the speed we want isn’t in the already listed options. 

after you’ve pressed other you’re just gonna want to type in your frame speed - 0.05 would be my optional speed. 

then press okay and your frame delay should be set !!

CONVERTING TO SMART OBJECT 

for the newer versions of photoshop you’re gonna have to use the action i linked at the top. all you have to do is command + a and select all your frames in timeline and select the group in layers which has all your frame layers then just press play on the action using the little triangle at the bottom:

give it a second and then your timeline and layers should look like this:

my action also turns all your layers into a smart object which is why is has just turned the group into one layer ^^. if you’ve done it correctly the gif should move if you drag the red vertical line across the purple box in the timeline.

CROPPING

okay so tumblr sizing: ava made a good tutorial/description for that here - x. she also goes over sharpening and a few other things. but basically what you need to know is that for one gif it is 540 px in width, the dimensions that i tend to use for one gif horizontally are:  540 x 400, 540 x 310, 540 x 540, 540 x 460. 

for two gifs that you’re gonna place next to each other they’re going to have to have a width of 268 px. i tend to use the dimensions of: 268 x 300 268 x 350 268 x 268

and for three gifs next to each other they’re gonna have to have two different dimensions:

so the one of the left is 177 px, the one in the middle 178 px, and the one on the right is 177 px. again a visual representation is much easier to understand so just have a look at ava talking abt it ^^. 

COLOURING

okay so colouring is kind of a personal preference and you kind of just have to play around with it til you get something that you like but i’ll walk you through what i did with this gif. (i'm actually using the colouring that i used in this gifset which i saved as a psd). 

this is what my base gif looks like without any colouring:

you can find all of these things i used to colour in properties (just hover over each icon to find out what it is):

firstly i'm going to add a curves layer to make it a bit brighter - so i enhanced the highlights and upped the shadows a bit:

then i added a brightness/contrast layer to add more contrast:

increased the vibrance by 15: 

added a gradient map to add a bit of contrast which i then put on soft light blending mode and changed it to 15% fill:

fiddled around with the colour balance to balance out the hues:

added a levels layer to increase highlights and shadows: 

then i just finished of with selective colour where i went through each colour individually and changed it til i liked how it looked. i change red, yellows, greens, cyans, blues and magentas on absolute and then white, neutrals and black on relative. you can toggle between relative and absolute at the bottom of a selective colours in properties (you can’t change the setting for different colours in one layer, so you’ll have to make another selective colours layer to change to the other mode)

SHARPENING

okay so i actually sharpen my gif before colouring in order to see the colouring better, and then i end up deleting that sharpening and adding it again with my colouring on top of the gif which i talk about further down but for now here are my sharpening settings:

filter > sharpen > smart sharpen: 

^^ using legacy and more accurate defines the sharpening a bit more so i use that, you find it by pressing on the little cog at the top of smart sharpening. 

another sharpening layer

filter > sharpen > smart sharpen

again using legacy + more accurate 

and finally one more smart sharpen layer but this time without legacy so i can reduce the noise slightly:

finally, i add a gaussian blur layer to smoothen out my sharpening:

filter > blur > gaussian blur

then i change the opacity of my gaussian blur layer to 15% by double clicking on the lines on the far right of my gaussian blur:

and that is my sharpening settings and now for when i add my sharpening:

i merge my colouring and gif layers together and then sharpen cause it makes the colouring stick better:

so i duplicate my gif layer and colouring group using command + j while selecting both layers at once:

ignore the current sharpening cause i'm going to get rid of that, its just as i said before to make the colouring process slightly easier.

then cause i have my current sharpening i'm just gonna drag the ‘group 1 copy’ smart filters to the tiny bin icon to the bottom right so it gets rid of my sharpening. and my layers now look like this:

now you’re going to have to select both the ‘group 2 copy’ (my colouring) and ‘group 1 copy’ (my gif) at the same time again using command + a then go to 

filter > convert for smart filters 

this will the merge the colouring and gif into one layer, do not attempt to normally merge using command + e cause that will stop the gif from moving. 

then we add the sharpening as i’ve already shown above. to the merged group so the final gif in layers should look like this:

EXPORTING 

now to export the final gif:

file > export > save for web (legacy)

now after you’ve waited up to several minutes for the damn thing to load you should now have this:

these are also the setting i'm going to be using and also usually use. the only things i ever really change are the colouring and diffusion modes

i actually went over this in more detail here - x. i already linked this at the top but here it is again. i do however use pattern diffusion mode now instead of diffusion cause i find it has a better overall finish but again its personal preference. 

also remember that tumblr has a size limit of 10mb so keep an eye on the size in bottom left (you might have to reduce the number of frames for your gif if the size is too big):

and now we are done and this is my final finished gif.

i apologise if certain parts of this or none of it made sense lmao i'm kind of tired and i tend to ramble incoherently at times. please do ask questions if you don’t understand or need me to explain something again i'm happy to help.