#mac tutorial

STEP ONE - MAKING THE GIF

*Make sure the movie/episode you want to gif is HD 1080p or 720p. Anything less is too grainy/ bad quality to make good gifs.

1. Open the movie/episode you want to gif in Quicktime. It should open automatically through Quicktime but if it doesn’t, just right click > open with > Quicktime.

2. Go to edit > trim

It should open up a little timeline like this:

3. Use the little yellow cursors to narrow it down to the scene you want to gif like this and then press trim:

(It looks small but the whole movie is 2+ hours so it will actually be a 2-5 minute long scene.)

4. Go to file > save and where it says export as: just name it whatever you want to. I called mine 1.

5. Open the file you just saved and go to edit > trim again. This time, choose the specific part of the scene you want to gif and trim it again. If you’re making a big gif that’s sized 545px, it’s best to make sure your clip is only 0.03 seconds long since it will save you the chore of having to cut so much of your gif in Photoshop. The way I usually do it is:

545px = 0.01 or 0.02

268px = 0.03

168px = 0.03 or 0.04

6. Go to file > save > and it will open a window like this.

Save it under a different name so that if you want to gif other parts of that whole scene you can. If you replace it then the clip we first created will be replaced with the new one.

And that’s how you get the scene for your gif! I know the process seems extremely tedious but I promise, once you get the hang of it, it takes like 2 minutes tops to trim each gif!

STEP TWO - CREATING THE GIF

1. Open Photoshop and in the top bar, go to file > open and choose your clip. It might take a second to load into Photoshop.

2. Make sure your timeline is on. If it’s not, just go to window > timeline.

3. Once your clip is loaded, you should see this little icon in your timeline:

4. Click it and go convert frames > flatten frames into clips.

It might take a few seconds for it to convert the frames.

5. At the bottom of the timeline, in the left corner there is a button with three squares:

6. Click that and this window should pop up:

Press continue.

7. Once the conversion has happened, click this button:

and make frames from layers

You should now have frames in the timeline and in the layer box. The first frame in the timeline will have a frame delay and the other frames will have a frame delay of 0. 

8. Click that first frame and delete it.

In your layer box, there will also be a folder titled Video Group 1, make sure you delete that group so the first frame you have is named frame 0.

9. You can also trim your gif right now in the timeline box. My gif was around 71 frames so I trimmed 10 frames from the end. To delete multiple frames at once, just right click from where you want to delete, hold and then click the last frame you want to delete. You don’t have to delete those frames from the layer box as well since once they’re deleted from timeline, the layer becomes empty.

10. Select all the frames in the by clicking the first one, then shift, then the last frame. Do the same to the layer box so that all the frames are tinted with the blue which indicates that they’re selected.

11. Click this button again:

and click convert to video timeline

12. Now right click anywhere in your layers box and click convert to smart object.

This smart object is our entire gif! You can skip to step four now if you like it like this or you can now sharpen and colour your gif!

STEP THREE - SHARPEN/COLOUR/CROP

1. The first thing I do is sharpen my gif using an action. I just this one by darthmoir. Download the one titled gif action by morgrana. To open the action, click the small triangle on the bar that’s on the right side of your screen. If it’s not there, just click window > actions and it should appear.

Press the small button in the top right hand corner

and click load actions.

Once your action is loaded, click the small play button at the bottom bar of the actions box (make sure the action is selected, not the folder.)

Once the action has played, your layer box should look something like this:

Your gif is now sharpened!

2. Colouring a gif depends entirely on how dark or light your scene is or the colours in it. Luckily, the scene I choose had very a easy colouring process. All the adjustment layers you need are in the adjustment box:

3. Start with curves, my window looked something like this:

4. Then levels, my settings were:

5. Then a black and white gradient map set to soft light at an opacity of 30%:

6. Then selective colour, my settings were:

7. And finally, another levels layer. My settings were:

And that’s pretty much the basic colouring. Depending on different scenes, you might need more adjustment layers but this is the order I usually colour in.

STEP FOUR - CROPPING

1. Once you’re done colouring the gif, we’re going to crop it. Press C and a cropping window should show up. Make sure your top bar looks like this:

For this gif, the cropping dimensions I set are 268px by 268px. If you want to crop it another size, you should follow the new Tumblr dimensions which you can view here.

2. Once you’ve placed the crop window wherever you want to crop it, just hit enter. Now your gif is cropped!

STEP FIVE - SAVING/FRAME DELAY

1. To save your gif, click file > save for web & devices > save for web. If you’re using Photoshop CC 2017 click file ? save for web.

2. Make sure your gif is under 3MB:

Your save settings should look like this:

!Make sure the looping options are set to Forever!

3. Now your gif is saved but if you open it in Tumblr, you’ll notice it’s moving extremely fast. This is because the frame delay is set to 0.03 and that’s too fast for gifsets. 

Using this method, changing the frame delay before saving doesn’t work since it will go back to 0.03 frame delay. That’s why we save the gif first and then open it again to set the frame delay.

To set the frame delay, open your gif in photoshop:

4. Select all the frames in timeline by clicking the first frame, pressing shift and then scrolling to select the last frame. Once they’re all selected, just press the small arrow at the bottom of any frame:

And in the window select other:

Instead of 0.03, enter 0.05:

And hit OK.

5. Save the gif again by clicking file > save for web and devices > save for web.

6. Make sure you save the gif by the same name it was saved as before so you don’t have multiple copies of the same gif:

And that’s it! Your gif is finished. Your final result should look something like this: