#psdteam

There's a lot to this tutorial, I've combined about five separate tutorials I used as a beginner into one massive one, so it's organised into chunks to make it easier to keep up. 

- - -

PART 1: MAKING SCREENCAPS.   Source I used to learn: here. Get KMPlayer (free dl): here.

1. Once you've downloaded KMPlayer, you want to open it up to the home screen; and then go to the top left corner of the window, where it says KMPLAYER, click, and 'open file' to then choose your video. 

2. Once your video has started up, go to the point you want to start the capping, and pause the video. 

3. Press ctrl + g (ctrl and g at the same time), to open up the screencap box which looks like this. These are my capping settings, and you want to make sure yours looks exactly the same in the places I've outlined. 

4. It's important to make a separate folder for these caps to go into, for later on in the giffing process. I have mine on my desktop under a folder I made called "Screencaps" - and then in numbered folders since the gif will probably be part of a set. By clicking on the yellow folder icon, you can choose the destination the caps will be saved. 

5. Hit OK, an then Start before playing the video. It will continue capping until you pause the video, or press Stop. It's easier to pause the video after the scene you wanted to make screencaps of has passed, since once it pauses - the cap taking stops. You should now have these screencaps set up in a folder. 

- - -

PART 2: SET UP GIF USING CAPS. Source I used to learn: here.  Photoshop CS5: here. 

1. On the top left of photoshop, click File and then Scripts. Now, for some people, the Load Files Into Stack doesn't work due to the copy of PS being *ahem* borrowed, so I go to Load Multiple DICOM Files which is fundamentally the same thing. 

2. Now, this window should open up, from which you're going to select the folder you saved the screencaps in. Hit OK. 

3. Your caps are going to load up into the PS window, make sure you don't have that many caps (for long scenes break it down) since it could take longer and even freeze your PS. 

4. Now that I've got the caps set up, I want to be able to see it as a gif right? We want the animation box at the bottom to go from one frame to all of them. Click the four lines icon at the top right corner of the long animation box, and then Make Frames From Layers.

5. Now you're gonna have a smoothly running gif, hallelujah! Except it's too fast and not sharpened and quite shite looking but hey, it's a start. Make sure all your frames come up in the animation box like this. 

6. You can play your gif to see how it would look, but I have a few frames I don't want to be included, so I select them all by clicking the frame i want to start with and holding shift and clicking the last frame of the sequence I don't want to be included. Then drag this now highlighted collection to the bin at the bottom of the animation box, and release your cursor to dispose of them. (Another explanation here if I've over-complicated it).

- - - 

PART 3: CROPPING THE GIF.

1. Once you know how many gifs are going to be in your set, you can start cropping the gif to fit that size. We always crop before we sharpen. There's a crop button on the left of PS, and at the top of the screen below File, etc, we can input our Width and Height values. 

2. Make sure the numbers you put in end with px. I've given my rough gif sizes here.

3. Once you've inputted the numbers you want, and have clicked the crop button, drag it across your gif image until you get the scene you want. Hit the tick that will show up, which I have highlighted below. 

- - - 

PART 4: CHANGING TIMING. Source I used for using actions (tells you how to save actions): here. I uploaded the action I made for this (does 62 frames): here. 

1. The gif is going to be way too fast if we leave it like this. The timing of my frames is 0.06 seconds, and to achieve this, we use an Action, which you can see is next to the image by the right above the text box. To get that opened up, go to Window - Actions so a tick appears next to it.

2. Click your first frame, and under the folder name 0.06, 'Action 1'. Then click the little play button I've highlighted, to make it work.

3. Once all your frames have been altered to last 0.06 seconds, we're going to sharpen the gif. 

- - - 

PART 5: SHARPENING.  Action I use to sharpen: here.  How to use this action in an alternate explanation: here. 

1. Trust me, you don't want to skip this part. Sharpening is what makes the gif so clear and HQ and a little grainy. The better the quality of the gif, the better the sharpening. The teen wolf episode I'm using has been downloaded in 1080p. 

2. First, we have to make frames from these animation frames. To do that we're gonna click the first frame again (important!) and then click the four lines icon again, but this time we're gonna hit Flatten Frames Into Layers.

3. Go to the sharpening action you should have opened up (explained how to in the source above) and make sure you have the first animation frame and Frame 1 by the right highlighted, and then start the action - which is going to sharpen every frame you have. 

4. This action sharpens every single frame with these settings:

5. When that's done, you will notice the impact it has (more so when you've coloured it, but still). Here's the before + after look. 

- - - 

PART 6: COLOURING THE GIF.  My detailed colouring tutorial: here.  PSD I made for this scene uploaded: here. 

1. Now we're talking, right? Okay, so this is the area we'll be working around, I've highlighted the parts we're going to use. 

2. Curves: Always start with curves. It brightens up the whole image. 

3. Brightness/Contrast: This brightens it even more, and adds a contrast to the colours you're gonna extract. I tend to like bright gifs a lot, so I use a lot of this. 

4. Vibrance: Now that Tumblr doesn’t have the “error uploading image” problem (if your gif is too bright/colourful), we can go crazy with this right? No sir; it’s really important to be nice and generous, but not high-on-vibrance generous with this, we want our gif to look editted, but keep it’s natural colours. This scene has a lot of colours we can play with, so I use the Saturation part slightly too. I've added two vibrance layers with the same settings. 

5. Levels: To add depth, I'm adding levels, which bring out the blacks in the gif and make it just look better overall. (Not right now, it looks shit rn).

6. Colour Balance: One of my babies, tbh. It gives you the chance to alter the colours in the whole image, and to get a more natural look, we want to move towards the Cyan and the Blue. I've added three colour balances, which I can't quite expand on here, but you can see the values on the uploaded psd. After 3 CBs: 

7. More Brightness/Contrast: To make it even brighter, and just more attractive, but don't go crazy with it since it could make her face very pale. I've added two more, and by decreasing the contrast we can make the effect of the brightness a little more subtle. 

8. Levels + Selective Colour: Yeesh, it's a little bright, eh? Let's add some more levels. Then, we start off Selective Colour to add depth by increasing the obviousness of the blacks in the gif. 

9. Selective Colour: I'm going to use this to bring out the colours I want. I want to brighten the green, the cyan of her shirt, the blue is too dark of her jeans, and the purple could be brighter in a shade of pink. I'm also going to brighten her hair tone a little. To do this, play with the arrows under each colour. Here are my settings:

10. We have actually finished the colouring portion now! There's awesome colouring tutorials everywhere to get you practising, otherwise check out this psd and try and get the hang of the layers (it only takes time). 

- - - 

PART 7: ADDING TEXT AT CERTAIN POINT. My text tutorial: here. 

1. Let's make the text first, by clicking the T on the far left side, and making a box on the gif, where we're gonna type in our subtitle and hit the tick. 

2. We're going to add drop shadow and stroke, to make the text stand out. My settings are:

3. Now, we've got our text all set up. But we want it to only show up on some frames, since she doesn't say the words until later on in the gif??

4. She starts saying it around frame 34, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to make all the frames before that one not have the text visible on it. Select all the frames in the animation box before frame 34, and then click the eye in the box next to the text layer to stop making it visible on those layers. Simple. 

5. Now, I want a gradual appearance of the text, rather than it suddenly appearing like whoa whiplash. On frame 35, we're going to make the opacity of the text 25%, then on frame 36, it'll be 50%, then frame 37 - 75% and from 38th frame, it'll be 100% opacity. 

JESUS CHRIST we are actually done. Quite a monster of a tutorial, but I hope you guys got the gist at least. Congrats for reaching the end. 

Colouring #1: Bright/Daylight scenes. 

1. Curves: The first layer I add. It brightens up the whole image, but use it modestly, you don't wand it to be too bright already. Since this is a daylight scene, be extra ungenerous with your curves.

  2. Brightness/Contrast: Basically the best tool ever, as it can completely change the lighting of your scene, but I also tend to play around with the "contrast" as well as the "brightness" since it gives you an obvious difference between colours. Also, keep coming back to this layer if you feel you need it.

3. Vibrance: Now that Tumblr doesn't have the "error uploading image" problem (if your gif is too bright/colourful), we can go crazy with this right? No sir; it's really important to be nice and generous, but not high-on-vibrance generous with this, we want our gif to look editted, but keep it's natural colours, so I almost never play with "saturation". 

4. Levels: Let's ignore how ugly and yellow it looks at the moment, and get this really important layer out of the way. It adds depth to the gif, and lets you play even more with brightness, since it darkens and defines the shadows already in the scene. Since its a daylight gif, it'll have less shadows to play with, and we don't want it to be too dark. I've used two level layers on this; we move the arrows to the right. (8, 0.85, 255) and (5, 0.78, 255)

5. More Vibrance: Still yellow as hell right? But right now I feel like the bright colour of the sky needs to be brought out more, as well as the other colours, so we're going to intensify them even more with some more vibrance.

6. Colour Balance: Oh yes, now we're getting somewhere. The gif as of now, looks way too yellow and green, and I tend to give all of mine a bluish pinkish tint, so we're going to mess around with the colours to give it a more natural feel. This is also the best layer of them all, so use it as many times as you want until you feel like it's perfect. (I used 3 on top of one another)

7. More Levels: I feel like it's too bright, without enough definition, as the colours tend to come out more with more blacks so let's bump up the levels to get our final product. 

Colouring #2: Dark/Bluey Scenes 

1. Curves: The layout is the same, the same sequence of layers, only now the Curves become a little more important. The scene is a little blue, and we need to get rid of that, to get more skin tones in there. Here, we're going to play with the other colours, so just click the dropdown RGB button, and click blue. We want to pull it down, which will make the scene green, but then alter the green curve a little down, so it doesn't become too red, but just a little pink. 

2. Brightness/Contrast: We can use this really generously, more so than usual, 'cause we want this to be as bright as possible without looking like the sun puked on it. Look, the scenes already less blue!

3. Vibrance: So we're going to make the colours much more vibrant, bringing them out now that the gif looks a little grey, but absolutely screaming potential with all those colours. 

4. More Brightness/Constrast: It's a really dark scene, so now we can go ahead and add some more brightness because, well, we can. See what works for you, I mend this layer a lot of the time in the process of colouring. 

5. Levels: To be honest, you can just leave it there, but I need more depth, and so levels need to be added to make everything just stand out a little more. 

6. Colour Balance: I think the gif is too yellow/orange at the moment, so I want to blue it up a bit, by using colour balance to move the arrows more towards "Cyan" and "Blue". And then we're done! I decided to stop there, but you can carry on playing around with it until you're happy with it.

Okay, to summarise, the layers we use are:

Curves

Brightness/Contrast

Vibrance

Levels

Colour Balance