#wehearttutorials

[1] Making your GIF (ft. Jonathan Bailey)

Make your gif through whatever method gets you to the video timeline. Just your usual - and if you have a regular sharpening that works relatively fine, you can use it here and skip [2]. Here’s what your layers tab, timeline tab, and working GIF may look like without any other edits:

[2] OPTIONAL: Smart Sharpen your GIF

For those who don’t have a regular sharpening... routine, this is how I do my basic sharpening. I will be using two different sharpens in this portion. Click on ‘Filter’ and find Sharpen. Hover your mouse on it and look for Smart Sharpen (shown below):

Click on it, and the window below should open. The first one I use is 500%, 0.3px, and Remove Gaussian Blur, but feel free to experiment as you wish:

the second smart sharpen I use is 10%, 10px, and Remove Gaussian Blur. Again, feel free to experiment. The ending GIF should be shown with the label “Smart Sharpen x2″ towards the end of this tutorial:

[3] Use what I call the “Vivid Sharpen” to further sharpen your GIFS

Normally you’d stop at [2] and be ready to post or do whatever else with your GIF. I do this extra sharpen because not all GIFs look great when posted here (particularly those downloaded off YT, bilibili, dailymotion, what have you, or bootl*gs as mentioned above). I got a relatively nice-looking video, but this will still help make the gif look sharper.

First off, duplicate your GIF layer twice. I use the Right Click on Layer and Click Duplicate Layer method because it works best for my timeline, but a good old Ctrl+J on Windows (Cmd+J on Mac if I’m not mistaken) should work. Just make sure all three layers are aligned like so:

Turn off the visibility of the uppermost layer (mpv-shot0090.png copy 2 here; see below) Click on the second layer (mpv-shot0090.png copy in this case) and change its blending mode to Overlay. This is what the layer should look like:

Now turn the topmost layer (mpv-shot0090.png copy 2) back on. Invert the layer by clicking Ctrl+I (that’s I, not L). This is what it should look like:

Now change the blending mode of this layer to Vivid Light. See results below:

Now click on Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur above. A window opens asking for the pixel amount. I usually enter in 3.0px but again, feel free to experiment. The GIF may now look overly sharpened, like so:

Group together the topmost layer and the layer just below that. This is important. I usually just highlight both layers and click on the folder icon at the bottom right corner. Once both layers are grouped together, set the group’s blending mode to overlay. This will remove the yellow spots you see above.

This is the last step for this version of sharpening. Set the opacity level of your sharpening group to what you think looks good. For 1080p source videos, I usually go for between 30-40% (I’m using 40% in the one below) opacity, but feel free to adjust according to what you like! For the 480p gifset I linked above, I used around 70%, give or take.

Here are the different results based on the sharpenings I did!

1. Young Assane + Green

 This is the base gif we are working with, it was cropped and sharpened, but not yet colored. The yellows and the cyans in the background will help us to get to the light green we aimed for.

First step: brightening

For brightening I like use just a bit of Curves adding lightness to the scene. Most of my brightening happens with Levels and Brightness/Contrast layer. After adding more whites to the scene with both layers I always add some dark and contrast to make the colors pop. But you can do the brightening part as you wish.

This is how our gif looks like now. Brightening brought out a few colors we can use later.

Second step: Hue/Saturation

After our brightening Assane’s face became a bit too orange, so I took back the saturaion of the reds and yellows. In case of the yellows I first added some hue so even after taking down sat the background got a greenish tone. On greens I upped the sat and played with the hue to get the green I first had in mind. After this we can still see what other colors the scene has, in this case cyan was most prominent. I added more sat to the cyans so we can see where it is located in the scene and the alter it with hue, until it matches the other greens of the scene, I did the same with blues but reduced sat there, because his jacket also turned an unnatural color. And in the end I reduced magentas and altered them a bit, so his face wasn’t purple after taking away from the reds and yellows.

We are here now, we could leave it at this, but I also wanted to give some more greens to the background, so now come my favourite tool, the selective color.

Third step: Selective color

Since most of the background stayed white I went to the whites and added as much green as I could and darkened it. This move also turned part of his face and clothes a bit green so I added a layer mask and painted over those part. This works best with gifs that don’t have much movement, but with a white background some moving is no problem. As finishing I added one more selective layer and corrected all the colors a bit more. First the yellows so his face looked a bit more natural, then the greens to make the background pop. As a finishing I added to the blacks with just +3, to get more deepth.

Finishing step: Exposure

I like to add an exposure layer to all my gifs as a finishing touch to bring out the colors and add some more depth. And we got our gif!

2. Claire + Red

Our base gif already contains the red we are aiming for, but not everywhere. For this gif I will only show the coloring, because the brightening and the exposure layers are the same I used before.

Hue/Saturation

First of all I reduced yellows and altered the hue a bit to make it lean toward red a bit more. On this layer I am not doing anything with reds because I don’t want to mess with her face. As we can see other than red, the background contains three main colors, magentas, blues and cyans. On all these colors I upped the sat so I can see where are they exactly and played around with the hue until I reached a red look.

Not yet what we wanted but we are getting there. In the next step first I will correct her skintone and then with a new layer color the remaining parts that are not yet red.

Selective Color

For her skin tone I again reduced the yellows and reds and lightened it a bit to look more natural. Then added some black to get a bit of depth. After adding a new selective layer, we are working with our secret weapon, neutrals. Neutrals can color everything that don’t have a color yet, using it works similar like color balance, so we have to be careful if we use it for correcting colors. In this case most of our background is quite gray, so first we add red to it, to match the color we want. I wanted a vibrant dark red so I added a lot of red and black and corrected it a bit with green and blue to get a deeper color. 

!But neutrals will also color her face too! So I added a layer mask and painted over her face and the area on the left side of the gif, since that was already red. Again this coloring method works best if there is not much movement. After adding a final exposure layer the gif is ready.

This method can work with almost every scene, but it still needs a base that is already close to what are we aiming for. I am using this kind of coloring for color palette gifs too, but there first I add a new layer and paint on it in one corner the color I want to have and then start coloring under that layer. If the colors match with the one on the new layer, I can delete that layer and the gif is ready.

getting high-quality videos

1080p is the best quality if you want clean and crisp gifs. you can get away with 720p,

i use different websites to t*rrent tv show episodes and movies. be careful when searching through these websites as they could affect your device with a virus. it's best to use a vpn to protect your device.

some links:

‣ tvshows.today

‣ filmxy.tv

‣ pahe.ph

for music videos, i use 4k download to parse the music video or any other youtube video in 1080p (if available). to directly download video files directly from websites such as soap2day, i use video download helper (it's a chrome extension).

*before you import your video into photoshop, make sure your version of photoshop has the timeline feature. to make sure it is on, open photoshop, go to windows, and near the bottom, there's the timeline option

this is the example gif i will be showing:

importing to photoshop

open photoshop and go to files > import > video frames to layers. a dialogue box will appear. make sure to select "selected range only" and to deselect the limit to every 2 frames option. use the arrows under the video to drag them to the moment you want to gif. make sure to have frame animation selected!

deleting unnecessary frames, set frame delay, crop, image resize

with the timeline on, you will see your gif having some frames that aren't needed. using the trash can button at the bottom, only delete the frames you don't want in your gif. in case you accidentally deleted a frame, you can always go back by clicking on the history panel.

now, click on the first frame and go all to the end, and press on the shift button while clicking the last frame to select all the frames in your timeline. optionally, you can click on the little button, in the upper right corner of the timeline panel, that has a bunch of straight lines. once you click on that, you can select the "select all frames" option. from there, go over to one of the frames and click on the number and go to other. this will pop up a dialogue box for setting the frame delay. personally, i set the delay to 0.06.

the larger the frame delay, the slower the gif will be. from there, with all the frames selected, go to the bottom left corner of the timeline panel to convert all the frames to video timeline. *make sure the forever option is selected. this will allow for your gif to loop infinitely.

then, going to the layers panel, press the shift button and select all the layers and right-click. you should see the option "convert to smart object". this will condense all the layers and make it into one singular object.

on the toolboard to the left, click the crop tool option. crop according to the different dimensions. with this example, i'm cropping this gif 540px by 300 px.

now to resize, go to image > image size. a dialogue box will appear.

make sure to change inches to pixels. on width type, change your gif width accordingly. for this example gif, i'm going to change the width from 1920 to 540. the height will adjust accordingly.

sharpening

now it's time for some sharpening!. these smart filters help with making your gif(s) clean and crisp. go to filter > sharpen >smart sharpen. these are the settings i use for all the gifs i make.

after you’ve sharpened your gif, you can color your gif. this basically means brightening, adjusting, adding contrast, bringing out or muting certain colors, et cetera. since this is a basic gif tutorial, i'll only show the layers that i use to create vibrant gifs.

adjustment layers

to add adjustment layers, hover over to the panel right above the layers tab. right next to the properties tab, click on the adjustment tab (circled in red). this tab will show the different options for adding adjustments that will make your gif look better!

i. brightening

the first adjustment layer i add is the curves layer (the top third to the left in the first row of the adjustments tab). using the little eyedroppers to the left, i set both a white point (by clicking the lightest area of the gif) and a black point (by clicking the darkest point of the gif), both are circled in re. by using these, these points instantly brighten the gif.

ii. coloring

with this example gif, there isn't much to color besides adding more color. by adding a vibrance adjustment layer (two over from the curves layer), you adjust according to how you would like your gif to appear. for this example, i'll show you a before and after.

and since i want it to be a bit more brighter, i use the brightness/contrast layer. i use this to give the gif an overall brightening lift and add some contrast. here's what the gif would look like at this point. i try not to add too many adjustment layers as it may add any unnecessary grain.

saving your gif

and finally, it's time to save the gif! go to file > export > save for web (legacy). most gifmakers, if not all, use this method to save their gif(s). use the most optimal save for web settings. what i mean by optimal is what save settings are best suited for you and your gifs specifically. here are my save settings. most of the time i use selective + pattern, but then again, it depends on the gif itself. for quality, i use bicubic. personally, i feel like it keeps the gif clean and crisp. remember to keep the looping option as forever.

and that's it! here's the final product:

1. Downloading Videos  

I use 4k Video Downloader to get videos from YouTube.

☆ The most important thing is to download videos in the highest quality possible (I personally never gif a video that is below 1080p)

2. Preprocessing 

This is optional, but I do see a big difference between gifs that I have preprocessed and ones that I used to make using only photoshop. It doesn’t take that long and you get a really smooth result, so I definitely recommend it!

Vapoursynth download + tutorial (make sure you download the one that’s titled ‘VapourSynth64Portable(200616).zip’). Since it’s quite complicated to download for Mac, I recommend trying Avisynth instead. I may do a seperate turotial on VS, but since the one I linked is in a video format rather than text, I found it really easy to follow compared to other written tutorials I had found!

These are my VS settings:

☆  GIF Size will change depending on how many gifs you want to make per row:

1 gif per row: 540px

2 gifs per row: 268px

3 gifs per row: 177px

You can change the height to whatever size you want, but I wouldn’t recommend going over 540px.

☆  Preprocesser is how many frames per second you want your gif to be. qtgmc 60 slow gets you the smoothest possible gif. As for the second setting, I always use debilinear. You can find more information on these here!

☆  KNLM is a denoising filter that basically smoothens your gif and makes it less grainy! You can also choose to utilize the sharpening setting here, but I prefer to do that in Photoshop!

Once you have chosen your desired settings, you can paste the output script that’s on the right-hand side into the VS Editor resizer.html window. (Please refer to the video tutorial〜)

3. Importing into Photoshop

To open the video in PS, go to file  > import  > video frames to layers (the preprocessed clip will be located in the ‘output’ folder). These are my import settings:

Your workspace will now look something like this: ( I’ve highlighted the frames in pink and the layers in blue, so you can remember!)

Now, delete any excess frames from the timeline if you have any (eg. frames that include a different scene). Then, select all of your remaining frames and click on this little button on the top right-hand side of the timeline:

From this menu, go to > convert to video timeline. Now, look at the layers on the right-hand side of the screen. If you deleted excess frames at the beginning, you should now delete the corresponding layers (that is, all of the layers without the eye symbol next to them).

To be able to colour and sharpen the gif, we have to convert it into a Smart Object. To do this select all of your layers and go to  > filter  > convert for smart filters.

4. Colouring Now, you can colour your gif however you’d like! There isn’t necessarily a right or wrong way to do this, but some settings I’d recommend trying out to begin with are colour balance, selective colour, levels, hue/saturation. To apply these settings go to  > layer  > new adjustment layer. 

☆ Below is are some examples of this lovely scene of Tifa ♡ The first one is a base gif (no colouring at all), and the second one is what it looks like once I’ve coloured it. We’ll get to the third one soon, don’t worry!

5. Sharpening

Click on your Smart Object in the layers tab and go to  > filter  > smart sharpen. These are my settings:

☆  The next step is optional, but it’s just a preference for how I like my gifs (it just makes them really smooth and removes a lot of the noise)!

Once I have sharpened my gif, I duplicate the sharpened later (right-click on the layer and select ‘duplicate layer’ from the menu). Then I add a gaussian blur filter to the duplicate layer (filter  > blur  > gaussian blur) and set the radius to 1.3.Your layers should now look something like this:

You can see the result is the third gif from the above step. Nice and smooth, right〜? 

 6. Saving your gif

To save our gif, we have to convert it back into a frame animation. 

To do this, select all of your layers and press the little bars icon above the timeline (the one we used to convert our frames into the video timeline from before!), and select convert frames  > flatten frames into clips. Now, select all of the visible layers (the ones with the eye symbol shown), and from the same menu as last time,  convert frames  > make frames from clips. Again, from the same menu, go to convert to frame animation.

To set the speed of your gif, select all of your frames and click on the little number icon below it (it should say something like 0.03), then click ‘other’. Here you can set the speed. I usually put it somewhere between 0.02 - 0.04 depending on the scene, so just try out which speed you prefer. 

Now, we can finally save the gif: file  > export  > save for web (legacy)! These are my output settings. 

☆ To make sure that your gif plays more than once, you must have looping options (near the ‘save’ button’) set to ‘forever’ ! ! !    

Again, this is just the way I make gifs, so there are many other tutorials out there that may be more suited to your preferences! You can find some examples of my gifs here.