Okay, so here is my tutorial on how to make gifs. Here is a few things to keep in mind: I use a Mac, so the way I make them is different from PC’s. I would assume that you could probably do it the same way? But I’m not sure. Also, I have only been doing this for a little while, so I don’t necessarily know how to edit the gifs to make them awesomely cool.
Okay so this is the tutorial that I think I used to download photoshop – I don’t think it’s a torrent, but I don’t even remember. But if you have a PC, you can search on youtube for “free photoshop download for PC” instead of mac. But anyways, do that. Or if you want, just download the free trial from adobe and maybe you’ll hate making gif’s so that’ll work out lol. Okay so here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkuRtFosp3w.
- Once you have photoshop, you need to have a video that’s downloaded. If you want to gif a youtube video, you can go to: http://keepvid.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DSX4bOKIEPdI and that will download a youtube video for you. Otherwise, what I do for all the Bo Burnham gif’s from Words, Words, Words on Netflix, I record the screen with Quicktime.
- For all intents and purposes, I am going to gif when he waves bye at the end of Words, Words, Words.
- So, you always want to record like 3 seconds before, and after you want the gif because when you use VLC (which you also need to download- and I think that that is the Mac-specific part of this tutorial. Which PC’s it’s easier, and if you google what program you need just use that instead) VLC lags like a second… so always do a little bit more than you need.
5. Then you want to export it (like making it downloaded on your computer.
6.
7. Open it with VLC.
8. This is important. Once the video is opened in VLC, you press Command+Option+S. This takes a bunch of screencaps rapidly. It automatically saves to your pictures. I renamed mine to that but you can change it to in like preferences or whatever.
9. Now open up Photoshop. Go to File—>Scripts—>Load Files Into Stack
10. Get all of the pictures you took from VLC and click “open” and “OK”
11. Once their all loaded in, you need to make sure the animation bar is open (if it’s not go to window—>animation) and click the little three bars in the corner over on the right side. You need to make frames from layers and also reverse the frames.
12. So now your screen should look somewhat like this:
133 Frames is WAYYY TOO MUCH for tumblr, so we are going to have to significantly cut down the amount of frames. Remember, I took screenshots of more than I needed because I wanted to make sure I got it all. Most of my gifs are around 15-22 frames for whatever reason. If I freeze the background, I can get somewhere around 30 and still have it fit.
13. I’m so dumb, the reason there were so many were from a gif I made from before. So, it still doesn’t matter because I need to delete down to what I want. I got it down to 32, which is still going to be too much. Cropping it makes it smaller, and like I said freezing the background does too, but that’s for another tutorial. I cropped it down a little, and I’m still deleting frames. You want to change the frame delay, which is how long each frame plays for. It is automatically 0 seconds but you want it to be somewhere between .1 and .15 seconds. Sometimes, I do . 2 seconds for shorter gifs. You want to select each frame by clicking the first one, then scrolling over to the last frame and pressing shift and press the last frame (that selects all of them) and then you click the little triangle thing and you change the delay.
14. So I got it down to 27 frames, which is still a lot, so it’s going to be a smaller gif. That’s okay. So now you’re going to press file —> Save for Web and Devices. That’s how you use it on tumblr so it saves in .gif format.
15. Now you need to mess around with it a little bit to save it. The limit used to be 500 kb, now it’s 1 MB. Like I said, this isn’t a super quality gif, and I understand other people can make them much better than I. As you can see, I changed the image size to 350, instead of 900 something for the width. Also, you notice the gif is 911 K, which is under the limit, which is great. You can change the colors to 128 to make the image size smaller, and like I said changing the image width / height, and black and white makes the image size smaller.
16. Save it and your good to go! This is unedited (like colors wise). Here is your final product!
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