#ihaveresources

I’m going to break this tutorial into 3 sections: organizing the panels, creating the comic book “look”, and adding the sound effects.

1. Creating the Panel Layout

1. Start by deciding how you want your “layout” to look. These really don’t have to be too fancy: usually I’ll just do rows of 1 or 2 panels, but if you need help getting a rough idea of what a layout might look like here are all my comic book edits. Again, nothing too fancy (unless that’s what you want). 

It’s probably best to plan which gifs are going in which panels in advance but I kind of make it up as a go.

2. Create a new psd and start in video timeline mode. Then using the rectangle tool, draw the rectangles based on your desired layout:

3. Create the gifs you will use for each panel. (Note: It’s important that the # of frames in your gifs are all the same.)  Make sure the gif is in video timeline mode & is converted to a smart object. No need to sharpen yet - we will do that later. These are the four gifs I will be using (one per panel):

The framerate is a little fast right now but that’s ok - I will fix this at the very end.

4. Now, you want to drag your gifs onto the psd.Use a clipping mask (ctrl + alt + G) to attach the gifs to the “panel boxes”. To resize your gifs within the panel you can just use ctrl + t.

So this is where we should now be at:

4. Final step is to add borders. So click on the rectangles, and then click on add layer style -> stroke to add a border. Personally I like the borders a little thicker to make it look more “comic book-y”. So I use a 5px stroke with position set to center:

And this is what our gifs should look like now:

So now we’re done with the setup, and we can move onto styling.

2. Styling the Gifs

1. Start by just applying your usual sharpening settings (I used a surface blur & smart sharpen).

2. After that, add a poster edges filter to the gifs. You can do this by clicking on filter -> filter gallery -> artistic -> poster edges:

These are the settings I used for this gif, but I do tweak them a little depending on the set (I’d recommend playing around with it a little until you find the setting you think works nicest for whatever scene you are giffing):

3. Click on the little arrow next to it and adjust the opacity. I usually like to set it to 50%:

4. Now, to add the halftones click on filter -> pixelate -> color halftone. These are the settings I recommend using: 

5. Click on the little arrow next to the halftones filter and adjust the blending options. I recommend setting opacity to no higher than 50%. You can use overlay, soft light, or darken - again, I usually play around with various setting until I find whatever I think looks nicest. These were my settings for this particular gifset:

So now our psd looks like this:

6. Final step is to add some coloring - I went for a bright & greenish coloring, so this is what I ended up with:

And now the gifs are complete. All that’s left is adding sound effects.

2.1 Save and Reopen (Optional)

A thing I like to do before adding sound effects is to save my gif and then work with the gif as a fresh psd. My photoshop starts to get really slow once I add all these filters. Adding the sound effects requires analyzing every single frame and this is a pain when photoshop is being slow. I find saving my gif and working with that instead makes photoshop much more tolerable so I do recommend these quick steps:

1. Save your gif. this is what it looks like currently:

2. Open your gif in photoshop:

3. Switch to timeline mode & convert to smart object:

4. Save as a new psd, which we will now be working on.

Ok, now onto the sfx!

3. Adding Sound Effects

For the sound effects there are actually two parts here: getting the sound effects and then animating them:

3.1 Getting/Making Sound Effects

First step for adding sound effects is to get the actual png images you will use. I actually got all my sound effects off the a:tla comics. This process is pretty straightforward:

1. Open the online comic book (I recommend comiconlinefree(.)net), find the sound effects you want and take a screenshot (I use snipping tool for this). For this particular gif, I am using the ‘shing’ sound effect from the bottom panel:

2. Open the screenshots in photoshop, and use the pen tool click on each letter, then right click 'layer via copy’. You should now have a separate layer for each letter.

3. Highlight all of the individual letters, right click, and convert them into a smart object. Then add stroke (I used 3px):

You can also use layer style -> color overlay if you want to change the color.

And I repeated the process for the swish sound effect:

Now that we have our sfx, it’s time to add them to the gifs!

3.2 Animating the Sound Effects

Ok, this step is definitely the most tedious. I recommend doing this one panel at a time. So let’s start with the first one.

1. Using the timeline feature, go frame by frame until you’ve decided where you want your sound effect to start. This is the frame I’ve decided I want the sound effect to start on:

2. Now drag the sound effect onto the psd and use transform (ctrl + t) to resize accordingly:

3. Add a layer mask (layer -> layer mask -> reveal all). Using the rectangular maquee tool, draw a rectangle around the panel the sound effect will be in:

Then right click -> select inverse. Now, with your layer mask selected, click on the paint bucket tool. Set the color to black and click on the psd. Unlink the layer mask from the layer by clicking on the link symbol in between them. Your layer mask should now look like this:

This will prevent your sound effects from flowing outside the panel.

4. On the videotime, click on the arrow to the left of where it says ‘Layer 30′. Then click the little clock to the left of ‘Transform’. It should now look like this:

5. Move a couple frames ahead. Click on the diamond by the transform button:

Now, use transform (ctrl + t), to resize/rotate/move your sound effect to where you want it to be in this frame:

6. Move a couple frames forward and repeat:

Continue doing this until your sound effect animation is over.

7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 for the other sound effects you want to add. This is how I animated the ‘swish’ sounds in the 3rd panel:

8. Now our gif should look like this:

9. Final step: save your gif, reopen and adjust the framerate (if necessary). And this is our final product:

And we’re done! Then you can just repeat for every other gif in the gifset!