#mydaylight

It’s a simple text layer with added black Stroke and Drop shadow. Here is the font settings we use for 540px gifs (sometimes we might take the font size down to 14pt. The line spacing might also be changed usually on 268px gifs). 

Here are the settings for the Stroke and Drop shadow layer style, but really the only changes are the size of the Stroke is set to 1 and we might sometimes play with the opacity of the Drop shadow. Otherwise you can leave the Drop shadow at default. 

Once we have this, then we edit the colours for the different speakers. Then the text layer is duplicated and the two layers are merged, which strengthens both the Stroke outline and Drop shadow. 

We find that 2px Stroke is sometimes too thick to be aesthetic but 1px is too thin. The BBJX gif below is 2px Stroke and I don’t know, it’s fine but I prefer a thinner outline for the text, so the way around that is to duplicate then merge; it gets you something like 1.5px.

Basically here are all the steps: 

These steps will make the text look like this:

After that, it’s just a matter of making the base gif and then select the appropriate line of sub to paste on top of the gif. Bottom aligning all layers will take the text down to the bottom for you. 

For something like the gif below, we would skip the Stroke and increase the opacity of the Drop shadow:

(Gargh now that I’m staring at this I realize I didn’t entirely crop out the one word of the Chinese sub at the bottom...)

Anyway, it actually took us stupidly long to realise that the Drop shadow helps make the subtitle pop a lot better. You’ll probably still occasionally see “new” gifsets that has been in our draft for a long time that were made before we started using the Drop shadow. By contrast those subtitles are not as clear as our more recent gifsets.