How to make (seamless) overlay gifs
What exactly is an overlay gif? Most of the time an overlay gif is referred to as a gif that is added on top of an image or gif or (layed over it, if you will). The term can be slightly confusing as it would have you assume that you’ll be using the Overlay blend mode in Photoshop, which most of the time is not the case. These gifs can also be referred to as animated textures or simply gfx.
First of all, here’s a quick rundown of how to use an overlay gif:
Open your base image (or gif) in Photoshop
Crop and size the image how you like (you can still do that later of course, but I’d recommend doing it now, especially if you’re using a premade overlay gif, as those are often rather small) (you can also add your coloring at this point)
In your timeline, click on “Create Frame Animation”
Duplicate the frame as many times as you want
Open your overlay gif
Select all layers in the layer panel, group them together
Select all frames in the timeline, click the button on the top right of the timeline and click on “Copy Frames”
Go back to your base image, make sure it’s the same amount of frames as your overlay gif
Select all frames and click on “Paste Frames” in the timeline menu
Adjust the position and size of your overlay gif
Change the blend mode of your overlay gif to Screen
Don’t forget to change the frame duration and loop forever
Make sense? If not, skip to step 11 of the following tutorial for a more detailed demonstration.
How to make an overlay gif:
First you need to find a video. There’s a lot of free videos you can use on youtube. You could look up ‘free overlay’ to get some ideas of what kind of videos there are. I’ll use snow today, so I just searched ‘snow overlay’. This is the video I’ll be using for this tutorial.
Some of these videos have a download link in the description, some do not (even though they say they’re free). There’s a bit of an issue with downloading youtube videos in good quality lately, but this site should work.
You can just make a gif from the video as you would with any other gif and then use it as an overlay gif, but personally, I like to make the gifs look as seamless as possible, so I loop them into themselves.
Here’s a comparison:
‘regular’ gif:
gif looped into itself:
To do this, you want to open your video in Photoshop (File → Open / Cmd or Ctrl + O)
Since the video is rather short, it appears quite small in the timeline. You can change the view at the very bottom of the timeline (If for some reason your timeline isn’t showing, go to Window → Timeline)
1. Trim the beginning of the video.
You can do this by simply clicking and dragging the beginning of the video. Alternatively you can also move your playhead to the point where you want to cut and the click on the scissor symbol in the timeline. In order to be able to loop the video into itself, we can’t use the very beginning of it, because we’re going to need to bring some of the footage back later (I’ll explain when we get there.)
2. Trim the end of the video.
When you’re dragging, you’ll get a little preview window that shows the Duration of the clip. If it says 00:21 for example, that means the duration is 21 frames. If it says something like 01:11, that would mean 1 second and 11 frames. How long 1 second is for your video depends on its framerate. Normal framerates are 24-25 frames per second (fps for short), but it can also be something like 23,9. You can see the framerate of your current video at the bottom of the timeline. As you can see, the video I’m using has 30 fps, so a duration of 01:11 would mean it has 41 frames (30+11). You should make sure that your video is no longer than maybe 25 frames. You have to keep in mind that the file size limit for tumblr is 3MB and the more frames your gif has, the bigger the file size. It also depends on your image dimensions. If you use a horizontal image that doesn’t have a lot of height, you’ll likely be able to get away with more frames, but with overlay gifs, I personally often use vertical images that have a lot more height than they do width, and in terms of the amount of frames with an image that big, child, let me tell you, the struggle is real. For those images I’d say if you want to play it safe, go with maybe 13 frames. Deleting frames at the beginning and/or end is tricky with this method, since by doing that, you’ll lose the whole seamless/looping into itself aspect of it.
3. Duplicate the video.
Click on the Video Group and hit Cmd or Ctrl + J
4. Move the bottom clip to the end of the top clip.
Simply click and drag it over.
5. Bring back the beginning of the bottom clip.
Click and drag it to the same position as the beginning of the upper clip.
6. Trim the end of the bottom clip.
Click and drag it, so the length of both clips matches. So why did we just do all this? Because now the end of the lower clip is the beginning of the upper clip.
7. Click on the arrow of the upper clip and click on the stopwatch icon where it says “Opacity” to add a keyframe.
Clicking the stopwatch enables keyframe animation. The little yellow diamond you see is a keyframe. When you add a keyframe it will be added at the current position of your playhead, so make sure the playhead is positioned at the beginning of the timeline (although you can move keyframes by clicking and dragging them.) You can animate different parameters using keyframes. Think of it as a snapshot of the current state of the parameter you’re animating. We’re animating the opacity here and the keyframe makes sure that the opacity is at 100% at the beginning of the video.
8. Move the playhead to the end of the clips.
9. Click the diamond to add another keyframe.
10. In the layer panel, lower the opacity of the upper video to 0%.
So now when you play this back, the opacity of the upper clip will gradually decrease to reveal the lower clip and since we made sure that the end point of the lower clip is the starting point of the upper clip, it will give the effect of looping into itself.
Now you can save it out as a gif. The cool thing is, you can save it out with its current dimensions, so you have a lot of playroom when you’re adding it to your image later.
To use your overlay gif, open it in photoshop.
11. Select all layers in the layer panel and group them together with Cmd or Ctrl + G. Double click to rename it.
You don’t technically have to group your layers or give the group a name, but I recommend doing it for the sake of organisation.
12. Select all frames.
On the upper right side of the timeline, click the little icon and choose “Select All Frames”. Or select them manually, if you prefer that.
13. Copy Frames.
From the same menu, select copy frames.
Open the image you want to add the gif to.
14. Create Frame animation.
When you’ve opened your image, your timeline should have a button that says “Create Frame Animation”. If it says something else, click on the arrow next to it and you should be able to find this option.
15. Duplicate Frames.
To duplicate the current frame, click the button next to the trash icon. Repeat this until you have the same amount of frames as your overlay gif.
16. Paste Frames.
To add your gif, on the right of the video timeline, choose “Select All Frames” and then “Paste Frames.”
You should get this window:
Choose “Paste Over Selection” and hit OK.
17. Change the blend mode.
Now that you’ve added your gif it’s covering your image. We don’t want that. Select your gif in the layer panel and from the dropdown menu change the blend mode to “Screen”. The Screen blend mode basically makes all the dark parts of the image invisible and in this case, we’ll be left with the snow:
When I recorded this tutorial I changed the image size of the picture and the gif to 540px, only because with something like snow I know I’m not going to need to do a lot of adjusting. You can see that it doesn’t cover all of the image, so I just pasted the snow gif again and positioned it below the first one.
18. Set Frame Delay.
Make sure you have all frames selected, then click on the little arrow on one of the frames. Select “Other” and enter your desired frame delay. I usually go with something like 0,07 seconds.
At this point I also added a layer mask to the overlay gif and used a soft brush with a low flow to make the effect a little less visible on his face. I also sharpened the image and added a bit of coloring.
Save your gif and you should have something like this:
19. High five yourself, because you just made a freaking overlay gif.
