Manga gif/img tutorial

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.

GIF Tutorial/Timeline Only/Mac /PC

Alright, here we go again… time for the new updated tutorial since a lot of what I mention in the old tutorial is outdated now and I find these ways to gif easier.

To begin, you will need photoshop with timeline, I will not be providing any links so just look around yourselves and you will find one eventually. Also MAC users like myself, you will need Quicktime Player and VLC. PC users can just use KMPlayer to extract their frames (though they can use quicktime and vlc like MAC if they want).

Before we get into photoshop I just want to explain how I gif using MAC because the process can get a little complicated. If the video you have downloaded is .MP4 then all you have to do is

and ill explain what to do there later. However if your video is NOT .MP4 then you will first have to open it up in VLC and record the segment you want to gif.

Click record before the scene begins and then click record again after the scene ends. You might have to change the directory in the preferences to where the video gets saved.

Now this part is a bit iffy since i’m not entirely sure why it happens but, sometimes when i record the segment/moment I want to gif, it will automatically change from .MKV or other formats to .MP4, however that does not happen all the time. So if it didn’t convert automatically,

Click on convert/stream and select the recording you just did to convert. Make sure your convert setting is .MP4

Save the video where you know it will be. Now that the complicated part is out of the way lets begin the actual giffing process.

Going back to photoshop if you use MAC or use this way for PC then all you have to do is import video frames to layers.

It will open up a window like this

Click on selected range only, and limit to every 2 frames. Using the two arrows on the bottom line specify the part you want to gif. Make sure it is only a few seconds long as it can import a lot of frames if its longer than a few seconds. Also If your starting out then having many frames makes it difficult to fit the gif under 2mb (tumblr’s size limit)

If you use KMPlayer on PC to extract your frames then use this

when it opens up click browse and select all the frames you want to gif and click ok. Wait for your frames to load both MAC and PC, it can take a while depending on how powerful your computer is.

Now MAC and PC should be on the same page. The frames are loaded and you can go through them on your animation bar/timeline. If you cant see the animation bar/timeline then go to window and click on it. This might say animation instead of timeline on CS5 (though I cant be too sure)

Also if your frames loaded like this

where the timeline is already open then all you have to do is click on

this little button on one of the corners of your timeline and it should look like the pic before this one.

Ok now the fun part. Click on the first frame and go frame by frame to see if there are any duplicates in your frames. If there are duplicates then delete those frames. Those frames make your gif look stuttery and can increase the filesize. PC users can go through each frame before loading them into photoshop to save time waiting.

Now that you have deleted the duplicate frames, play your gif and see if it looks fine. PC users, if your gif is playing backwards and you dont know why then just click

and

this should get your gif playing normally.

Resize your gifs to 540px for everyone on tumblr to appreciate its quality. Go to

This screen should pop up

Now, this part is subjective but I prefer resizing my gifs on bilinear. Other people resize using bicubic, its really up to what you prefer to see and what you want your gifs to look like. Bicubic makes the frames of the gif look like how they did before the got resized. Bilinear makes the lines look a bit jagged(Not too much like nearest neighbour, that shit looks ugly). Test both ways if you are unsure and find the one you like.

IMPORTANT TIPS :

If you are giffing an action scene/sequence then try keep your frames 20-25 if you are a beginner. Filesize can get really big with all the movement happening in the gif.

If you are giffing a scene where the camera pans up then also try keep that under 20 frames as panning gifs have the largest filesize.

Check to see the filesize before you start any gif. Before you do anything to the gif check the filesize. You can do this by going to save to web

in save to web screen

you can see the gif file size under neath the words GIF. This gif is 2.6mb

It’s too big for tumblr’s standards. I have to delete frames so that this gif fits in under 2mb. Which leads to my next tip

Dont delete frames from the middle of a gif. Unless the gifs cuts to a diff scene having your gif go smoothly and then skip ahead is very jarring IMO and it is just not pleasant to look at. If your going to delete frames then delete then from the beginning or the end so your gif dosent jump around.

Ok now that we got that out of the way, lets begin talking about your gif timing. For me action scenes deserve 0.07 as the gif speed. It makes it look much better than slow moving gifs for action scenes. Scenes where characters are just moving and theres only light movement, the speed is 0.07/8 and scenes where characters are just talking, the speed is 0.08/9, now these are all just my speeds, everyone has their own speeds for them but as long as you don’t go above 0.1 speed for gifs then you should be fine. I’ll show an example

GIF on 0.07 for light movement

GIF on 0.1

you can see how much more fluid the gif on 0.07 is, 0.1 looks terribly slow in comparison. This is why I recommend not going above 0.1, gifs will stutter so much to the point that you can see every frame clearly which is not pleasing to look at. This example only shows light movement as well, imagine action scenes this slow.. Its not even action at that point *shudders*.

OK thats enough on that. Lets move on to making the actual gif, the whole point of this tutorial. Click on the timeline button once you have adjusted your speed, highlight all the frames and right click and convert to smart object.

Now we can sharpen our gif. Go to the filters tab and go to smart sharpen, I usually sharpen 500 by 0.3 and thats it, but when i resize using bilinear i try not to sharpen at all or I use 0.3 and 200 since bilinear does a good job and making things look sharp already. Again its up to you which way you go about it, ill give an example

Bilinear with 130 by 0.3 sharpening and surface blur

Bicubic with 250 by 0.3 sharpening and surface blur

its up to you to pick and choose what you want, in this gif i prefer using bicubic but other things I like using bilinear more.

Which leads me to my next point and that is DO NOT OVER SHARPEN YOUR GIFS

like I did it before, i’m ashamed yes but over sharpening something is not the way to go with anime gifs or any gifs in general. I’ll give another example

No sharpening

good/normal sharpening

OVERSHARPENED

honestly theres a general rule you can follow, and thats once you see the white halo around the edges turn back your sharpening 100-150, if it dosent go away even then go back until they are just not noticeable. Over sharpened gifs don’t ever look nice and if you don’t want to be considered a photoshop noob then you would do well to avoid this.

As for surface blur, go to filters tab again and go to surface blur. My settings are always 3 for radius and between 2-6 for threshold. This all depends on the gif, if I gif ghibli I use 2 for threshold but normal anime i mix between 3-4 with some gifs requiring 5 or 6 threshold. Also please do not abuse the surface blur either because adding a lot of blur to get rid of the detail while it MIGHT make the filesize go less, you are pretty much sacrificing gif quality and clarity.

Now, colouring the gifs is always a touchy subject. But I guess I’ll focus on a colouring style that keeps your gifs clean. Firstly, try not to use vibrance and saturation in your gifs, vibrant gifs with colours everywhere are usually not clean at all. Second, decide a theme with your gifs, I usually go with warm colours but you can choose cold colours as well if you like. Deciding a theme is crucial as if you don’t have an image in your mind then its hard to just come up with something that will work on the spot. Start off with colour balance, go through all of the settings and go towards warmer or cooler colours, then go use selective colour and change the colours even more if you want, use the neutrals tab to go towards your theme as well. I suggest not making the colours too vibrant as grain/noise will most likely show up. You can also add some brightness but try not to add too much, it will reveal blobs if they are there and can make things bad depending on the scene.

When you’re done save to web again

Firstly

see the button on the top right?, click on it and then click sort by hue. It makes the colour table look much better though it dosent have much practicality aside from that LOL.

Ok small things aside there are some things im going to address. Such as, most gifs look their best at adaptive and pattern, though I’m not going to say the other options are bad. Diffusion and no dither can look as good or better than pattern in the right circumstances. For example scenes from ghibli movies look really good on diffusion or no dither.

This gif is put on diffusion. It wouldn’t have looked as nice on pattern or no dither.

this gif was put on no dither

it all depends on the scene. IF you see noticeable blobs using no dither get away from it as fast as possible, gifs do not look nice when you have blobs floating around the place. Also this is the reason why I said use less surface blur on ghibli, the more detailed it is, the better it looks on no dither or diffusion

All this being said, beginners are advised to use adaptive pattern on pretty much all their gifs until they get a feel for giffing and checking what works with what.

At this stage just check if your gif is over 2mb or not, if it is save the gif and open it up again and delete some frames until it fits. You could also lower the colours of the gif to lower the filesize but I would advise against it unless you want grainier looking gifs. Just set the looping options to forever and Save.

Congrats if you made it this far, hopefully you learned something from this and start making gifs of your own.

Final Product