#ps things

Okay, I'm going to jump right in.

When I have everything on the timeline, resized, and ready to go, I start off by adding grain. (Ruis) My program is in dutch as I am dutch so I'm not going to explain all the technical stuff, as it will get lost in translation, but I'll just do a quick rundown of what I did with this set. (I use Photoshop2022) I'm not an expert whatsoever, I studied art/media design but that was 4+ years ago and while photoshop was used heavily, gif making is not something that ever came up lol.

Add the grain. Filter tab -> grain -> grain. 0,6 or 0,7 will do. Tick Gaussian and Monochromatic. Next, sharpening. Filter tab -> sharpen -> smart sharpen. I use this filter twice with two different settings as follows:

These are basic sharpening settings a lot of other creators use, so nothing special there. Next, to make it even sharper, I add high pass. You can find this under the filter tab above, at the bottom of the list. Filter tab -> other -> high pass.

Select it.

Keep it at 4,0. You can play around with this, but I like to keep it at 4,0. Now it looks a little weird so we have to make some changes. Go to the blending option of the filter you just applied (the high pass) and change it to 'soft light' on 70%.

Again, you can play around with this. I also use high pass on gifs that are darker. I used it in this set to let our babe Ryan stand a bit more out.

Okay to really show the difference between not adding the grain + sharpening + high pass vs grain + sharpening + high pass, here you go:

I remade this one real quick, as I didn't have the psd anymore but you can see the difference better than the one with the shark illustration gif. I didn't add any other filters, only the grain + sharpening + high pass. When you add the filters and increase the lightning/contrast, it will look even sharper. Sadly I don't have the file anymore, so I can't exactly recreate it, but I just used the filters mentioned; curves, levels, and exposure.

Funny thing is, not all the shots in my copy were grainy. It's just a few that have unruly pixels because the file has been compressed. Like our dear Hooper here, that part of the movie was just a little blegh. And not everyone has the space or the money or other resources to get the deluxe Bluray whatever, so you gotta do what you've gotta do I guess. Of course you want your file to be HD, preferably 1080 or above, but well, shit happens. With the grain added, it just looks better in my opinion. The grain fills in the annoying pixels. You can also add grain after sharpening, but it just looks better, again my opinion, when you add it before sharpening. Plus I found out my gifs looked better on mobile if I added grain before sharpening rather than after. If this is something you worry about, I would add the grain before sharpening.

Do note though, adding grain increases the file size of your gif!

Okay, next up, the other filters I've applied. I added curves. The numbers at Input (Invoer) and Output (Uitvoer) are for the two dots in the middle.

Lower dot: input 15 and output 11

Higher dot: input 27 and output 25

Not much, just a little tick. The next filter I used is levels.

The only thing I changed is the Outputlevels (Uitvoerniveaus) to 2. This is something I do with all my gifs, sometimes a bit more at 4 or 6. I just like how it looks I guess haha. Next I added exposure.

exposure: +0,56. offset: 0,0000. gamma correction: 0,72.

And we're done with Photoshop! Because my MacBook is really old and kind of past its time, I just save the file as a gif without cutting any frames and open it again in Ezgif. It all runs smoothly until I have to convert a gif multiple times and this just saves me a lot of time. Ezgif is a free website where you can make and edit gifs. I use it to cut the frames, add some contrast if necessary and decrease file size (another tip!) so it's under 10mb and tumblr will accept it.

Gif before adding all the filters:

Gif after grain + sharpening + high pass + the other filters:

Gif after running it through Ezgif and adding some contrast (5) to decrease the size of the file:

I hope this answers your question! If you're really stuck on something, you can always send me a private message! I didn't do much, just the grain and the sharpening and the high pass. I think it adds a little edge to the gifs as well. Thank you for the ask and have a nice day!! 💜 💜 

1) the most important thing: good quality of the source material, i.e. at least 1080p. sadly youtube compresses even 1080p which makes the quality worse so it’s always my last resort to get stuff from youtube. (looking @ you, kenobi trailer 😔) here’s a good post on t*rrenting

2) use mpv player and make caps instead of importing video frames to layers. here’s a good tutorial on how to do that. i used to only make png caps because the quality’s better but i’ve switched to jpeg because i don’t have the patience to wait ages for the layers to load in photoshop anymore LMAO

3) coloring is sooo important. i can’t give you a magical solution here because i think everyone should find their own style but one thing i almost always do at the end is selective color > black > increase black. that makes the dark spaces less pixel-y and the gif looks less washed out.

4) you can change the opacity on filters. on my old gifs—and it always makes me cringe—the sharpening looks terrible because it’s just too much. you can right click on the smart sharpen filter > edit smart filter blending options, and play around with the opacity a little until it looks nice n smooth

5) if you do have gifs that look pixelated, try adding a ‘surface blur’ smart filter. that’s saved my ass so many times giffing star wars resistance. works best on animation but i’ve used it for live action before. i use these settings and lower the opacity as needed:

(i have no idea what settings are ‘normal’ for the surface blur filter but this works for me lmao)

6) save settings. i mostly use adaptive for the color reduction algorithm and pattern for the dither algorithm. i’d recommend not using diffusion unless you can’t avoid it 😭

but really it depends on the individual gif what looks best. (also: ‘matte: none’ removes that annoying small border around gifs)

i randomly picked this paper png for this example (it’s too low-res and not that pretty, i don’t recommend it lol but you can search for something similar). 

and then working in timeline mode in photoshop, first convert your gif (together with your psd colouring layers) to a smart object (select your layers > filter > convert for smart filters), place your ripped paper png below your gif smart object and drag/adjust the duration timeline of the paper layer so that it matches up with the gif.

right click on the gif smart object > create clipping mask and you’ll end up with this!

then just resize the paper layer until you’re happy with how your gif looks.

if you don’t want the bottom part to be transparent like this, you can always add another layer under your paper layer and change the colour to match your mobile theme background.