#smart objects

Things you need:

a 720p/1080p video (lower res looks awful in my opinion), in which the subjects aren’t moving too much;

a Photoshop version with timeline (I can’t do anything without timeline sorry);

good knowledge on how to make gifs (screencapping, importing layers, sharpening etc...) and layer masks;

patience because I suck at explaining things and English is not my first language.

I created 3 gifs with the same number of frames (not too many) separately, then converted them to timeline, and to smart objects. The gifs have to stay on the same canvas, so I click on new -> file (or Ctrl+N).

I always use the new Tumblr dimension, so a width of 540px and, in this case, a height of 200px

Now I drag all my 3 smart objects on this canvas. They obviously look muuuuuch bigger than I want, so i click on each one and hit Ctrl+T to make them smaller and fit the canvas. Remember to always hold Shift while doing this, and always use the little square in the corners (never the ones on the sides), or your gif will look like a total crap). When I’m done, I sharpen each smart object and make sure the gif I want to put in the middle is the upper one (the layer named 720_028 is the middle gif), so my layers look like this:

and my image like this:

so it’s time to work with the eraser tool, to smooth the borders of the middle gif and merge it with the others.

You can’t use the eraser tool directly on a smart object, so I select the top layer and click on this icon, “add layer mask”

and a little white rectangle will appear beside my smart’s object name:

Now I can use an eraser tool, here’s the settings I used

but you can play to the size and the opacity to get the result you want.

This is how my image looks like when I erased both sides of the middle gif.

As you can see, the left part is ok but I still have a border on the left side, that’s from the Ezra’s part, so I’m gonna erase it too. I just click on its layer and create another layer mask

that I use to erase and smooth the side the same way I did before.

Here’s my canvas now (the big circle is the eraser).

Now, I choose a psd or create a coloring from scratch. If you want all your gifs with the same coloring, you can put your psd on the top, above all your three layers. But I decided to make the middle gif in b&w, so I put it under the upper layer and above the other two, like this:

To color the middle gif, I use a Black & White adjustment layer (you can also use a gradient map or a hue/saturation adjustment layer with saturation on zero, on your choice).

To apply the effect only to the upper layer, I right click on the b&w layer and choose “create clipping mask”.

this little arrow appears

and now my canvas looks like this:

We’re almost done! Just put a text on the top if you want, and save your gif.