#mapofyourstars

import your video that you'd like to gif

you'll navigate to file > import > video frames to layers. a box will pop up asking you to go to wherever you have your video saved. you can use some downloader online if you'd like for your videos (be careful!), or you can use vlc media player, a free software. (if you'd like a tutorial on that, let me know!) click on whatever video you'd like to import and import it.

2. select the part of the video to import for your gif

another pop-up will come up and it will look something like what's below. no clue if the settings will look like that for you, but that's okay. you'll use the two little black arrows(?) at the bottom of the video player to select whatever part of the video you'd like to gif. the left-hand-side will change to "selected range only" once you do that. make sure that "make frame animation" is clicked. I don't know if photoshop changed this, but for me, I can only import 500 frames at one time. a warning box will pop up when you hit "OK" if you have more than 500 frames. you'll learn over time how many frames a scene probably takes up, and for bigger scenes, you'll need a few files to gif everything you'd like.

3. clean up what you imported to be the exact layers you wanna gif

once you hit okay, your screen should look something like this.

because you clicked "make frame animation", you'll see the frame animation at the bottom as well as all the layers on the right-hand-side. here's where you'll start deleting layers that you don't want in the gif because usually you'll have a few frames that are from the previous or following scene depending on what parts you chose.

I want to delete the first 13 layers because they are from the scene before. so I'll select all 13 layers on the right and hit the trash can. a box might pop up and ask if you want to do that action. you'll say yes.

your animation timeline at the bottom of the screen will look something like this now.

you'll select all those blank layers in the timeline and hit the trash can. if another box pops up asking if you want to do that, just hit yes again.

you'll do the same thing at the end of the timeline with the latter layers. delete what layers are from the following scene of what you wanna gif, and then delete the blank frames in the timeline below.

4. create your gif

your screen should look like this. (lol @ me making a gif of my favorite scene again.) you'll have the entire clip you want to gif in the timeline as well as your layers.

now, you'll want to crop your gif to whatever size you'd like. pressing c will get you to the crop function, and you'll drag the sizes of the canvas to get rid of any excess black space on the bottom of the images.

if you know how many pixels/inches to take off for the image (I do after doing it enough times), control + alt + c will get you to the "canvas size" pop-up. it usually defaults to inches; I change it to pixels. if you know the exact dimensions you'd like, you'd put them here and hit "OK".

so now your gif will look like this.

before you actually "form" the gif, you'll have to change the time between each frame. you'll select all the layers in the timeline at the bottom and click the little downward arrow on one of the layers. this is entirely up to preference, but I usually hit "other..." and use either 0.06, 0.08, or 0.1 seconds depending the scene. I've found it doesn't really change the file size of the gif, but it does make the scene go slower or faster depending. you can play around with it and see what you prefer.

technically, you are done with your gif now. you'd just have to resize your gif to whatever size you'd like and save it for web. however. I'm going to show you what more you can do to your gifs to make them just a little better.

5. spice up your gif

with the timeline layers still highlighted/selected, you'll click the little button with three lines on the right-hand-side of the timeline and click "convert to video timeline".

the timeline will change to this and all the layers on the right-hand-side will now be visible, as seen by the eye icon being clicked for all of them.

you're going to select all your layers on the right.

then, navigate to filter > convert to smart filters. a pop-up might come up. just press OK. your timeline and layers will now look like this.

you can do loads of things with the layer on the right now. you can apply sharpening filters, gaussian blurs, whatever you'd like honestly. you can find all these options under filters (> sharpen (or > blur)). here's how you find smart sharpen. it's best to just play around with filters to see what you like best. (I can also provide some guidance if you'd like.)

for instance, I created an action for sharpening my gifs, and you'll see on the right-hand-side all the filters that I applied to my gif. this makes the gif look crisper and/or smoother.

you can also play around with the coloring of your gifs by clicking the (half) circle icon. loads of options will pop up, but the one I'll show you today will be the curves option. (make sure you have selected the top-most layer of your layers to apply the curve or whatever else to every layer - it sort of acts as a filter over-top of everything.)

the curve box will pop up, and you'll click the diagonal line to adjust the color/brightness curves applied to the image.

each curve you apply to a gif will make the gif look slightly different, and curves usually can't be applied from one gif to another unless you are making a gif of the same scene across multiple gifs. you learn best by just playing with this filter to see what makes the gif look the best, and the curve will adjust as you move those small squares on the line/curve; so you'll see all your changes as you work on them. the before and after the curve is below.

in this instance for the colors and brightness of this scene, I would do more filtering and coloring to adjust how bright it is and to tone down all the greens and yellows (damn yellows!) in the scene. at the end of those adjustments, the gif will look something like this. I added a selective color filter, played around with the yellow in the gif, and then added another curve to make the darker parts a little darker.

6. save your gif

prior to saving your gif, you'll want to resize it to something reasonable. you'll note that I didn't resize until this point - I just cropped the scene. this is to ensure you are working with the most pixels for the editing/filtering process. you lose clarity when you size down, so you want to save all re-sizing for the final steps.

when you resize for websites like tumblr, the widest you should ever really make your gifs is 500 pixels. the width of the dashboard is 500 pixels and anything wider will get compressed by tumblr. compression = bad for gifs, so we want to avoid that at all costs.

you can use the short cut control + alt + i to get to the image size screen. it should automatically be in pixels - if not, change it. keep all the things at the bottom checked if not already checked, and change the width to 500 pixels.

now, you'll save your gif. the shortcut to save for web is control + alt + shift + s, or you can go to file > save for web. it might take a few seconds for the gif to load, but this will pop-up.

important things to go over. you'll want to change "looping options" to "forever".

also, you're gonna want to look at the file size of the gif.

you'll see that this gif is 2.208M, which is a little too big for best optimization for tumblr (less than 2.0M is best to prevent compression - though it could be 3.0M now based on things I've read. so ideally, just keep your gif size below 3.0M or else tumblr will compress the crap out of it.) in order to change the file size of the gif, you can go back and make the canvas smaller, so crop more off from the top or bottom of the gif; get rid of frames from the gif itself, which will involve you going all the way back to the beginning and deleting frames before you converted to smart filters; or just think of other crafty ways to make the file size smaller. for this example gif, however, we are good to save it.

the "save optimized as" box will pop up, and you'll just navigate to where you wanna save your gif and done.

7. celebrate your achievement

you did it! you made your first gif!

8. practice, practice, practice

I've been making gifs on and off for years, and I'm just learning the little details to make my gifs way better with different filters and blurs and everything else (because photoshop is powerful). the first few gifs will be bad or difficult to do, but after you make ten, twenty, thirty (or gif a really, really long scene), you'll be so much better. then, you'll get a feel for what looks good for your style - color filters, vibrancy, curves. after that, you can add captions on your gifs (can give tutorial if needed) or add static images to overlay (also can give tutorial) or even do fun things like these here, here, here, and here.