pbsbyariel | tutorial: making gifs in adobe photoshop cs5

Making GIFs in Photoshop CS5

I've seen a couple tutorials on this but I lost the links of the ones I really liked, or they didn't go over the very basic stuff, or they were just needlessly complicated, so I thought I'd just do a write-up on how to make gifs in Photoshop without needing any screencapping software or anything. Photoshoop actually lets you import and edit videos now, which is super useful. I'm not sure but I think CS3-CS4-whatever have the same video import function? I used it for a bit before I got CS5, but that was a while ago. ANYWAY SO UH you can try this if you've got another version of PS, I recommend CS5 because I'm in love with it and want to marry it though.

First of all, open up Potatochop. (Duh.) Apparently gif-making doesn't work in 64-bit version, whoops, so if you have that, use 32 bit. It may ask you to update to the newest Quicktime. Idk, it did for me. OBVIOUSLY YOU CAN SEE I AM A CONSUMMATE PROFESSIONAL. Anyhoodle, go to File > Import > Video frames to layers. Like so:

Then navigate to your video. Some video files are not supported by PS, so if it's not showing up, you may have to use a video converter. I just got GOM Video Converter which I have not had the opportunity to test but I like their other software, so. Anyway, open your video file and a screen like this should pop up:

Now, if you just hit "OK" from here, PS would convert the entire video to a gif... which is going to be way too big, unless your video's like. 30 seconds long. What you want to do is select a range from the video instead, so click the "Selected range only" radio button.

* The darker part of the bar is the part of the video that's been selected; it's going to ignore all the lighter parts.

I highly recommend setting "Limit To Every 2 Frames" also, beeeecause generally speaking if you don't, your gif is going to come out super slow. It'll just give you way too many frames. Make sure "Make Frame Animation" is checked -- if it's not, PS will go to its timeline mode, which... IDK you can play with that if you want, but I find frames & layers easier to work with.

What you have to do next is find your range. This is the biggest pain in the ass; there is no way that I know of to make that video preview any larger, which means if you have a large video and you're making a small animation, it can be tough to find the part you actually want. Slide the bar along the video until you've found the part you want to animate. With the bar at the start of that section, hit SHIFT and drag the cursor to the end of the range of video you want; this will tell PS to make frames from that section only. Hit OK.

Now your screen should look like this:

If you don't see the toolbar at the bottom with all those frames, go to Window > Animation.

Okay, so now we have frames and layers converted from the video. But we selected too much crap; we only want Gerard Way's face. SHIFT+Click to select the frames that you do not want, then drag them to the little trash can on the toolbar, highlighted here in yellow:

Keep cutting down on layers until you have a workable amount; generally this will be between 5-15, depending on the size of the end gif, how many colours are used (more, lighter colours = bigger filesize, and more black or white space = smaller file size, because anything that changes from frame to frame adds to the size of the gif. ) etc. You may have to cut down even more when you go to save it and find out it's too big; the cutoff for Tumblr is 500kb and PS' filesize estimates aren't always accurate, so preview before posting. I have been able to push it to up to 35 frames for Tumblr using careful editing, but 15 is less frustrating to deal with if you want it to be high-quality.

You can preview what the gif looks like in PS by hitting the play triangle in the animation toolbar.

That is the absolute basics of gif making. To save it from here, go to File > Save For Web and Devices. Some options will pop up, like so:

I highlighted the stuff I most frequently work with when messing with gifs. First I adjust how many colours to use -- the fewer colours, the better. Unless my gif is really short, I usually go with 128, not 256; the difference in quality usually isn't that much, especially if you have a simple gif with few colours. Notice the dropdown lists that say Selective and Diffusion -- those are both options as to how PS compresses the gif. Playing with these features can lower your filesize, but will also lower the quality of the gif. Another tool you can use to lower your gif's filesize (and quality) is Lossy -- the higher the Lossy, the grainier the gif is, but it cuts out a huge chunk of filesize. I rarely need to go above 15 Lossy.

(You can also adjust the image size, looping options, etc from here.)

When you're satisfied with the filesize and the way it looks, hit Save; PS will ask you to name your gif and save it somewhere as a new file. You can then navigate to the folder you saved it in, open the file and preview it. Don't like the way it looks? Go back to the PS file, open File > Save For Web and Devices, and start over, using different options. It's gonna be a lot of trial and error until you've found out what settings you like to use.

You can save your animation as a PSD file with all your layers and masks and shit in case you want to go back and edit it later, or you can trash it once you've got your final gif.

Now, just making straight gifs is fine for the web, where you can find places to host gifs several Mb in size, but if you want to post them to Tumblr, you're going to have to do a lot of editing to actually have it show up on the dashboard. I'm gonna write up some basic tricks for editing gifs in another tutorial, this one's getting kinda long.

Misc options

You can select how long each frame plays for by highlighting the frame(s), clicking on the "0.04 sec.", and selecting a different amount. Usually I leave this alone because PS' automatic time is usually all right, but sometimes I make it longer or shorter, it just depends. You can select one of the presets, or enter a time manually using "Other..." For live action animation, .05-.07 seconds is generally ideal. You can adjust all the frames in the gif at once, or you can do one at a time, or you can make one very long and the rest very short, go nuts.

Another thing you can play with is the small tab that says "Forever" on the bottom left of the animation toolbar. This designates how often the gif loops. You will probably want to keep it on Forever to have your gif loop infinitely, but IDK, I don't know your life, you may want it to just cycle through once.

Next up: editing gifs.