#our tutorials

I assume you know how to make gifs. If not, you'll find all information about it in our FAQ or /tutorials page.

1. Make your gif resizing it to 200x113px - those are the dimensions I put but you can make it bigger or smaller, of course. Sharpen and add coloring.

2. Now go Image > Canvas size and enter 500x160px - again, these are optional, though width must remain 500. If you cropped the gif before (instead of just using Image > Image size to make it 200x113 - which is proportional to Youtube videos) perhaps the parts you cut will appear again when you enlarge the canvas, so before enlarging pick the Crop Tool:

select the whole canvas by dragging it and crop it. Nothing visible will happen, but this is necessary.

3. Save this template I made, open it with Photoshop and drag it to the gif canvas you just enlarged. Layer > Arrange > Send to back. Now:

If you have a timeline button and converted to smart filters, you only have to select the gif layer and place it on top of the black rectangle.

If you don't have a timeline button, select all gif frames and all gif layers in the animation bar and in the Layers Panel. Now click on the canvas, don't release and place the gif over the black rectangle. This may take a while since there are many layers and frames your computer has to move. So my advice is, place it as close to the rectangle as you can and then use the keyboard arrows for accuracy.

There are approximately 20px between the horizontal edges of the template canvas and the gif so if you think that means too much space between gifs in the gifset, you can go Image > Canvas size and decrease height.

4. Now open a Youtube Channel (for example 1D's and open Uploads) and take a screenshoot, then open it with Photoshop and crop the part you want. If you have a Mac, you only have to press cmd + SHIFT + 4 and screenshoot the piece you want. There is Windows software for doing this as well.

Youtube channels show the "views" and the "time ago" below every video - as in the previews. If you also want to have the name of the user who uploaded the video, you have to open a video and take the screenshoot from the list in the right sidebar, see.

You can also pick different parts of the text (bigger title, only views and not date, whatever) and then join all the pieces of text together. Or also replace the text by your own words, following this tutorial.

5. Once you open the screenshoot with Photoshop (I'll call it the "text layer" from now on), you have to cut it like this:

very close to the horizontal edges. This is important only if you brush/cover the text I left in the template, because you'll have to place your text manually and go Layer > Align > Vertical centers (while selecting both this layer and the background layer in the Layers Panel) to put it right in the middle. If you don't have a background layer, create a random fill layer and rasterize it.

I left the text in the template so you can easily place your own text on top and don't need to do the previous process. Just wanted to let you know how to center it in case you erased it.

6. So once both the text and the gif are placed what I'd do is create a new fill layer and put it between the first gif layer (which is usually called Frame 1) and the template because the black rectangle may be a bit visible underneath the gif and I'm a perfectionist.

Now that a fill layer's covering the template, you can set the text layer to Multiply since its background is white, in case you set a fill layer color different from white (I did, mine is clear grey. I believe. You can set any other color).

Have in mind the fill layer will be underneath the coloring that's on top of everything so very clear colors usually become white because of brightness.

However, you can always select all the coloring layers and go Layer > New > Group from Layers... then click on this buddy  at the bottom of Window > Layers to add a layer mask to the group. Now use the Rectangular Marquee Tool to select the rectangle where the gif is, go Select > Inverse and:

Select the Brush Tool.

Make sure the white box next to the group of layers has a border like this around it (the white space that appeared when you clicked on the buddy ^). If it doesn’t, just click on the box once and it will appear. This box is in the Layers Panel (Window > Layers).

Make sure your Color Picker looks like this.

Now, brush the inverted selection to erase all the coloring layers inside the group from the rest of the canvas - not the gif. 

Hope you understood all that!

This last part is especially useful if you want to add textures or a pattern as background, or more text, or a shape... to make the list more original. 

Happy giffing!

How to make and edit a gradient map

I thought this would be a good opportunity to explain this properly!

There are several ways of achieving this sort of effect. Most of the times it's better to turn your picture black and white, for which we will be using gradient maps: Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map. Before adding a gradient map, your color picker must look like this:

which is the "normal" state for the color picker, the way it usually looks like. The colors won't necessarily be black and white. If you pick others, those will replace the ones set as foreground and background in the color picker.

The color picker will look that way if the background layer or a picture layer or a type layer, etc — just not an adjustment/fill layer is selected in the Layers Panel (Window > Layers). If an adjustment/fill layer is selected, it'll look like this:

and you won't be able to change the colors in case you want to use different colors than black and white. Besides, if different colors were previously selected, you won't be able to see them there. The color picker will look exactly like that, only white/black in the small boxes and black/white in the bigger ones — remember, IF an adjustment/fill layer is selected in the Layers Panel.

SO select the background layer (or a picture layer, or a type layer) to pick the colors you want, not an adjustment or fill layer.

Okay, now once our color picker is ready, we go Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map, OK. In Window > Adjustments (or Properties in CS6) you'll have this:

right? well, click on it. A new window pops-up: the Gradient Editor. In Presets you can select if the gradient will consist on both fore/background colors or just the foreground:

 and then you'll have this bar:

which is a tool for modifying the amount of black and white in a picture; this is basically adding contrast and brightness without needing any other adjustment layers apart from this one.

This depends on your liking, but what I usually do is move the white thingy at the right-bottom corner to the left (until it says Location: 80/90%, more or less, right underneath). You'll see a small dot will appear aligned. The dot adds contrast, so move it to the left to put more white in the picture, or to the left for black. You can also move the black thingy at the left-bottom corner to make the picture darker.

If you mess up, you can press Ctrl + Z (Windows) or cmd + Z (Mac) to undo.

Then, press OK and that's it.

That's how you turn a picture black and white! Sometimes a gradient map is used in the coloring (not only to desaturate the  image), by setting it to Soft Light and lowering opacity (or not).

Actual tutorial

Let's get started then!

I prepared a few examples before getting to the actual graphics if you can call those things graphics so the first thing I did was picking white as foreground and black as background to create an "inverted" gradient map. I got this:

That's obviously inverted and you could leave it like that if you are capable of making the graphic stand out by other methods — like textures or text, but the tutorial must go on.

1. Combining the black and white gradient map ^ with fill layers

Layer > New Fill Layer > Solid Color and pick a light color. These are the blending modes you can use:

You will find those options in the Layers Panel. This is basically giving the edit some color, as you can see it seems like I'm just pointing the obvious, but this could give you some ideas, I guess.

2. Combining a colored gradient map with blending modes

In the next image the gradient map is a normal gradient map — I mean, the foreground is darker than the background. The previous map made the picture look inverted because the opposite happened. So yeah, it's good to know that. Here I put the same color than before (the color of the fill layer) as foreground and white as background. Then created a gradient map and changed blending modes:

Difference and Exclusion invert the image too!

I honestly don't know why it turns blue and purple so you'll have to try different colors I guess.

3. Introducing invert layers as well

Here I put a black and white "normal" gradient map and a fill layer set to Multiply. You can see the result in the top half of the following picture:

The bottom half has the same layers plus Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Invert.

It's red because that red is the opposite of that blue/green, apparently. Remember in the first step, when he added an "inverted" gradient map to desaturate the picture? well if we had added a "normal" map and then an invert layer, the effect would have been exactly the same.

4. I don't know how to call this

This one is pretty cool for a grunge design:

open your picture and use the rectangular marquee tool to make a selection - if you want it to be exactly the half of the canvas, create another one with half the height (or width if your selection is vertical) and select it, then drag the selection to the first canvas

right click on the selection > layer via cut

create a "normal" gradient map and place it on top of one of the layers:

create an "inverted" one and place it on top of the other:

right click on the one that's on top of everything and select "create clipping mask" so it'll only affect its picture (you can make both clipping masks but it's not necessary unless there are more elements in the graphic, such as textures):

create a new fill layer above the rest and set it to Darken. here's the same graphic with a different color

There's something we can learn out of this, when it comes to Darken.

If we select a color that's in a corner of the color picker (see the small circle there):

the grays of the picture will still be grays even if we set the fill layer to Darken. If the color is not in the corner:

the grays will change. See it in the picture below: "no-corner colors" on the left and "corner colors" on the right:

The two previous examples were "no-corner colors".

My results, step by step

STEP 1. Again, open your picture and divide it in halves as I explained in 4 ^ using the Rectangular Marquee Tool and right clicking > Layer via cut, so you'll have one layer per half. Sharpen and add your coloring on top of both halves.

STEP 2. There are different things we can do here, for example you can add an "inverted" gradient map and it looks like this:

STEP 3. That's one option, looks good enough. The invert layer you can see there does this if we make it visible (and delete/make invisible the gradient map):

STEP 4. Doesn't look good at all. Now we are creating a new selective color layer right on top of the invert layer, as clipping mask too.

We are using the selective color to make both halves look more alike. This is what I did:

Reds. Cyan +100 (because it changed the spot behind his head, but well, I could've skipped this) and Black +100 (because it changed the baby's clothes to darker — since there are red tones in them).

Cyans. Cyan -100 (to get rid of the cyan that doesn't go well with the rest of the graphic).

Blues. Cyan -100 too and also Yellow +100 because seemed like a good idea to me (you see, it's all about trying).

Whites. Cyan -100 | Magenta -100

That's how I achieved this:

Then I added a couple of textures and here's the final result:

Now, how to make this one:

STEP A. Open your picture, sharpen and optionally add a black and white gradient map; I like it better with a gradient map in it so I can change bright/contrast in the Gradient Editor. Duplicate the canvas.

STEP B. Now pick two different colors to make another gradient map. It doesn't matter which one (foreground or background) is darker or clearer because we're using both ways.

STEP C. Add the gradient map, go to the canvas created in A and add the same gradient map but inverting colors in the color picker:

  STEP D. Combine layers, stamp visible or whatever in one of the canvases and drag the layer to the other canvas. Use a selection tool to make a shape and clear what you selected; for example, I made a circle. Tadaa!

The tutorial is over, finally! Remember: gradient maps, both black and white and colored and also color fills, and blending modes. It's actually easy! It only gets a bit difficult when you have to make colors combine by using selective color, but it's no big deal.

 Happy inverting!

1. Make your gif and sharpen. I'm starting with Simon's gif.

Blueish scenes are very easy to color in this case! Actually you only have to add a new Curves layer and set it like this:

The effect itself is basically done. You can leave it like this - nobody will know that you only applied one layer; but let's do a few more things, just to see what happens.

2. Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Selective Color and increase Black in "Blacks". The changes are barely noticeable, though. This makes the black looks darker - if that's possible. I mean, it adds more contrast by only changing the blacks and not the rest of the colors of the gif, opposite of what a Brightness/Contrast layer would do.

Now go "Whites" and increase Black. This makes the face have more colors in it, different shadows. In the picture above ^ you can see it had been filled with a single color, kind of grayish.

3. Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation. Here I chose "Cyans" because my gif has blue tones. I think what characterizes this trendy coloring is the predominance of the same tone in the whole gif, that's why I decreased saturation of the color that stands out more - the cyan, blue - so the whole gif would look duller, more grayish.

However, you can always add a bit of coloring if you like. For example:

And that was it :) Time for the yellowish gif!

4. Firstly, let's add light to the gif, as always. The previous Curves trick doesn't work here, so I chose the same path I always use:

I also added a Brightness/Contrast layer, Brightness: 40

5. Hue/Saturation time. Here I entered:

Reds: saturation -40

Yellows: saturation -40

Maters: saturation -20

When it comes to gifs like this, Saturation is your best ally. Reds and yellows are the predominant colors in the original scene, that's why I decreased them - the same way that cyan/blue was the predominant color in the Simon gif.

6. I created a new Selective Color layer and entered Black -100 in "Whites", then set opacity to 50%. And now - this is optional, in case you think your gif does not look pale enough, Vibrance.

7. I added another Hue/Saturation layer and did this:

Done! I never tried before but I think I figured it out. Remember: add light, then Hue/Saturation and change whites and blacks in Selective Color layers. Easy and fast.

Quick tip!

If you open one of these:

Selective Color > Whites

Color Balance > Highlights

the white parts of the gif will turn to the color you increase (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow) or decrease (the opposites) in Selective Color - Cyan/Red, Magenta/Green, Yellow/Blue in Color Balance.

This was requested a few times so I'm sorry it took this long! I hope everyone gets it, it's not hard at all.

First of all, it's important to pick the right screencaps/scenes. Obviously the more white or black the scene is, the easier it is to colour it for this purpose. I'm giving you a few tricks to make whites or blacks more noticeable anyways.

Here we go!

light gifs

I'm using this scene:

As you can see, it's not even that white.

First thing we have to do is, as always, adding light to the gif. You have to be careful with this because too much light may cause grain if your gif, making it look unquality.

What I always do is trying to increase Brightness and see how it looks like (80 is the higher value I reach 99% of the times). Then a little contrast if you like. Then I used Curves, clicking on the middle and dragging to the left-top corner of the box:

The coloring depends on the colors of your gif. I always modify Reds anyways. This is what I did (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Selective Color):

I decreased Yellow in order to make the background (the empty space at the left) more dull and increased Magenta only a bit because I didn't want the whole thing to look too pink-ish. By increasing Black the lips turned darker (because the lips were red and we are working on the Reds tab, for those who don't know).

Below I modified Whites by decreasing Black, which adds more light to the gif by turning the clear parts of the face more white. See the difference:

lips red as blood, hair black as night

Now if you open Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation and click on Reds, you can add more Lightness as I did here:

This is more of your choice, depending on the final result you want to achieve. The whole gif looks more white this way, so for our purpose here (which is the contrast with black gifs) this techinique is fine, but the gif looks better with the reds in my opinion. So, that's on you.

If you increase Saturation though, the colors will be back but they look softer, so you can do this too:

You may want to add more effects at the end; effects we have been applying at the beginning, but that's okay. I created a new Levels layer and moved the black and the grey thingies a little to add more contrast:

Every time I change a setting my values are tiny, as you can see, not very extreme, especially when it comes to selective color. I do it like that to prevent losing quality when saving. Extreme values are not okay! Unless you want your gifs to look awful. Then yes.

Here it is:

Now we are doing this little trick that consists on creating a new empty layer and using the Brush Tool to paint it white (with a blurry brush) where the space is:

I added even more contrast in the last one. I don't remember how exactly, but probably used an Exposure layer. I'm explaining how exposure works in the second part of the tutorial so :)

In the other example, I applied a coloring that came out like this:

I created a new Hue/Saturation layer, opened Yellows in the tab - because the gif is kind of yellow-ish and Saturation: -40 Lightness: +25 to desaturate the gif a bit. This way it looks duller and contrasts more with the black.

Then I picked the background color next to her face and brushed a new layer:

dark gifs

This is the scene I chose:

Again, you have to be very careful with the amount of light you add here. I followed this tutorial - basically added a Curves layer, clicked on the middle of the box and dragged the dot to the left-top corner (as in the light gifs part of this tutorial) and then decreased "Blue" in Curves too. I didn't use Levels or moved inputs and outputs in the Curves window.

I also added Brightness/Contrast and entered Brightness +30. This is how it looks like:

Not very bright, but I will take care of this later.

This time I added a Color Balance layer for coloring. I always try to balance Red and Yellow because it looks more natural:

Here I added the Exposure layer. I always increase Exposure to add more light (be careful with this because sometimes the light parts will look too white) and Offset for the contrast. I like to do this, it's a "clean" way to add more contrast and it doesn't spoil the gif - actually kind of "hides" the grain.

Selective Color time! Here I increased Black for the lips and Yellow for the hair. It looks af if I didn't do anything though:

(same thing I did in light gifs I think lol).

Now I added a few Levels. More brightness and contrast:

Personally with dark gifs I don't care much about the coloring (as putting vibrant colors, I mean) because they tend to look unquality very easily, so I prefer to find the right amounts of brightness and contrast to apply and save the gif from the grain.

I created a new layer again and painted it black using a blurry brush because there was a blue line next to Lydia's foreground. You have to be careful here though, so the brush won't be noticed when she moves. That's because the line still shows at the beginning of the gif, but I wouldn't care about that.

In the other example I added another step. I reached this:

Then I created a new layer to paint the background black. There's more we can do though: we can even brush over her face, covering half of it. You will need a very big blurry brush for this. This way we add even more black to the gif (I also added Levels at the end):

That's it :) so you guys have to use adjustment layers to change the contrast and the light, and also the tab "White" and "Black" options in Selective Color help a lot too.

1. Make your gif as always. Don't convert to timeline and/or smart filters. Have in mind that you will have to duplicate all of the frames you have, so don't add too many. For example, a 245px width gif allows around 80 frames, so here you can put like 40. Besides, black and white gifs weigh more than usual, so that counts too. My gif has 54 frames and weighs almost 1 MB. More info here.

2. For sharpening your frames without converting to timeline, you can use this action. If you have a timeline button, you can sharpen later. Select all frames and open the right-top corner menu in the animation bar > Copy Frames. Now select the last frame in your animation bar. Open the same menu and select "Paste Frames..." "Paste after selection".

3. Select all frames that have been pasted (they should've been automatically selected though), open the same menu and click "Reverse frames". Enter a lower time delay value. Mine was .01 If needed, you can enter a higher value in the "original" frames so the change will be more noticeable.

4. Now go Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map. Make sure your foreground color is black and your background is white in the Color Picker before doing this. This new layer will show in all frames. All you have to do is select the frames you don't want it to appear in and click on the eye next to the gradient map layer in the Layers Panel. The gradient map should show only in the copied frames now.

That was it :)

You can even use slow-motioned screencaps for the coloured part using MPEG Streamclip (x) by taking very accurate screencaps, in step 7 where I said "Frames per second: 24" you'll have to enter a higher value. Just have in mind what I explained in the same step about the size limits.