alright so you wanna know how to make manga gifs, well step right up cause we’re going to dive right in it
so the first thing you need is a HD source, 1080p is expected but sometimes you can get away with 720p, for imgs the higher the quality the better it is so even 4k res would be nice for imgs,
I’ll be explaining IMG’s first because gifmaking is just a bit different with this filter.
so find a HD img, im going to be using this img of naruto, it’s really high res so I dont have to worry about it looking bad. Put your img in PS and go to
filters > filter gallery > notepaper
thats the filter you’ll need for this to work, click on it and you’ll see various settings, you just have to keep in mind that you always have graininess and relief on 0, the img balance setting, you can change depending on how you want your gif/img to look like.
so if you’re following the tutorial with the img im using then you’ll probably notice that the img isn’t really looking all like a manga just yet and theres a lot of different things that go b/w that you don’t necessarily want to go b/w
this is what it looks like when i put img balance to 23 (as a general note you may want to stick to img balance between 18 – 28 because it gets too light/dark after that)
now obviously you dont want your img to look like this, its too detailed and not everything is properly b/w etc, so for imgs it’s quite simple you can just mask over all that you dont need, so for this img i masked just hinata and naruto and made everything else white. But you can probably tell, naruto/hinata dont look too great either. So here comes the sorta not really complicated part. If you want you img to look better, you have to make filters before the notepaper filter.
So, to make the lines stand out a bit more, i used poster edges
made the lines stand out a bit more, then i used selective colour, now you might be wondering how to use selective colour in a smart object, and thats simple, you just go here
and that will open up selective colours in your smart object, from here we mess around with the colours.
So the goal is obviously to make the img b/w so dont concern yourself on how it looks before it turns b/w. The trick here is, notepaper makes darker colours black/grey and lighter colours white, so keeping that in mind we can manipulate selective colours to help us make our end img better looking. Also, when using selective colours, putting it on absolute rather than selective is better, because we can make drastic changes with absolute.
naturally all our layers will be under our notepaper layer, i used another selective colour to darken the blacks more.
here is what our img looks after we applied all the filters to it, i lightened the red and yellows and greens so those parts could go white and darkened the rest as much as i could so those parts go black, i also lightened the cyans to make his eyes go white, obviously it looks ugly at this stage still, but now we can apply our notepad filter to it and get better results than the first time.
great! the img looks much better than the first time, obviously theres still that ugly background so make sure you mask what you want before doing all these filters, im just explaining it without masking because of effort of masking that again lol.
So from here, you’ve masked naruto and hinata out of the pic and obviously they still arent completely b/w so what you want to do is clean up the little details, like hinatas arm and pants and hair and narutos arm and hairband and jacket and headband. Make a new layer make those all black (or white depending on what you want).
Now what you want to do is make a levels filter above everything and drag the black slider all the way to where the black line is
and that will make your img completely b/w.
So essentially you’re pretty much done here, but i’ll show you some filters that might help make more hd looking imgs at the end.
Soo, after the levels filter I use minimum. For smaller pictures I use only 0.3(smaller meaning like atleast 720p) and for this gigantic pics like this naruto one, i use like 0.5 because when you go resize the lines will be reallly edgy and small for huge pics.
Also if you’ve noticed but the notepaper makes the lines REALLY edgy looking if you zoom in so minimum helps smooth those out just a bit.
Resizing time, rasterise your image and resize it to whatever your liking.
as you can see it pretty much looks like a manga img at this point so apply whatever filters you want to apply to make your manga caps look the way they do. I’ll tell you some filters i use to smooth the lines even more since it might still look fairly edgy for you.
here is what i use, surface blur is pretty much optional, i dont think it does much/ or anything at all. Minimum helps makes the lines smoother, i use 0.2 on 100%, topaz clean is sorta optional, you can use diffuse if you want and lower the opacity, i use maximum after that which is on 0.2 on 40% opacity. And then smart sharpen, i use 140 by 0.3 removing lens blur.
Then for adjustments, since for me it gets sorta blurry at this stage if you dont do anything else with just these, I use a b/w gradient map, dont change anything from that, then i use selective colours on absolute, i make the whites -5 and the black +5. Then I just exposure and offset on +0.0060 to make the blacks not 100% black. And you’ll get this as the end result
ta-da! your manga img is done…(finally)
I forgot to mention but if there is part of an img that just wont go the right way for you/ turn black or white, then you can go over those parts manually with a new layer and you can use the magic wand tool on the original img and then go to the new layer and colour on the new layer whatever you wanted it to be.
now for gifmaking… it’s pretty much the same except you can only really do it for very specific scenes unless you want to go mask out every frame of a gif…(which you dont)
So the scenes you’re going to be on the look out for is when the background isn’t really detailed and theres not really harsh gradients in the scene and some b/w contrast.
I chose this scene before
because firstly, i had the movie in 1080p, secondly theres nothing going on in the background and thirdly there was contrast between his hair and tie with the rest of the gif which would be white.
For gifmaking though, you have to make apply those filters BEFORE resizing, and huge tip but poster edges works reallly well with these gifs because the lines get more distinguishable. Just follow the steps above really, use selective colours to make the colours you dont want black lighter and the colours you do want black be darker, in this case i just darkened the hair and made the blues lighter. Then ofcourse you can apply the notepaper filter and minimum above that.
After you’ve pretty much done adding the filters, you want to make the whole smart object into another new smart object. Just right click the smart object with all the filters visible and make it into a new smart object. This way when we resize the filters dont change. Resize now and you’ll see you can apply more filters now to your liking. I use pretty much the same filters as my manga ones so if you want to use them as well go ahead. Otherwise do whatever you want to and save the gif.
Just a heads up, the gif saving process might take a long time, esp if you have a lot of frames because i has to render out all the filters from the first time and then all the filters from the second time and since the img is still essentially 1080p that also causes it to go slower, so just wait patiently for it to save.
If when the save to web menu shows up and the gif looks completely inverted or for some reason black, then just change from adaptive to selective or the other way around, that usually fixes it. I use no dither and have to lower the colours a lot sometimes so be careful about the frames sometimes if you have too many then the gif might look bad when you lower the colours to under 20 colours.
THAT’S IT
heres how it looks at the end.
Mangastream 