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Alright, here we go again… time for the new updated tutorial since a lot of what I mention in the old tutorial is outdated now and I find these ways to gif easier.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

The Requested Anime Gif Tutorial. (For Timeline Only)

This tutorial will cover the you need to make your own gifs. I’m using Photoshop Cs5 Extended, though this tutorial should work with those that have the timeline as well. I will not be covering how to make gifs that are not anime so if you are looking to gif real life humans, backgrounds, etc.. this probably wont help as much as it should. I will also not be covering how to get photoshop so just look around and you will definitely find one with a timeline

Use KMPlayer. If your not already using KMPlayer you are missing out on a lot. KMPlayer is a necessity for anime giffers and most top giffers will be using its built in sharpening feature. Load your vid you want to gif and open screen capture. (Press CTRL+G or right click and go to capture and then frame extract) Here we will be changing some settings. In your frame extraction screen copy these settings.

These are my settings I use when capturing my frames. The prefix can be anything just keep it small and the digits should be 1. I like to extract every 2 frames as anime has a lot of double frames that become a pain to remove otherwise. The main thing you should be focusing on though is the size to extract. I forgot to click specified size but that should be clicked and the size should be 540 or 500 if your still using old tumblr dimensions. MAKE SURE ITS ON SPECIFIED SIZE AND YOUR DIMENSIONS ARE 540×303 OR 500×281. The KMPlayer sharpening will not happen otherwise. Click start at the beginning of what you want to gif and click stop once you have gotten what you want to gif.

After you have extracted the frames you want to gif go ahead to where they got extracted and delete all the frames that are the same. This keeps your flow of the gif smooth and lowers the file size also.

Here are the frames before deleting all the double frames.

Here are the frames after deleting the double frames.

You can also rename them at this point, but I don’t always do that as the prefix usually does that for me. Ok now load your frames in Photoshop. Here’s how if you don’t know already

Go ahead and click your first frame, then scroll all the way down to your last frame and hold shift and click on the last frame. This should highlight all your frames.

Click OK and start loading your frames. Make sure you load them with these settings aswell.

Click OK and begin loading. This should really only take a minute or two unless you have a lot of frames (which I would not recommend beginners to attempt. Try keep most of your gifs 30 frames and under, I will explain why later.) After your frames are loaded your screen might look something like this

If this is the case just click on this little button right here.

That should turn it into this.

Go to this button

and click on make frames from layers. This should give you a screen something like this.

Ok from here go back to that button and click on reverse frames. When you first load your frames the frames are reversed so this makes it back to normal.

Go back to that button and the click on select all frames, go to this little arrow under the frames, click it and then click on other.

Change the timing to 0.09 this is the optimum speed gifs should go at imo. Making it any lower will be too fast and making it any higher will be too slow. I know the whole giffing community says the best speed is 0.13 but at that speed I find it hard to ignore the gifs stuttering. (This speed is different for graphic makers and 0.09 should mainly be used for normal gifs) Go ahead and play your gif to see if it is working fine or not and change the looping from once to forever if you have not done so already.

OK at this stage your gif should be finished (technically) however if you want your gif to look nice then go ahead and click on the timeline button again.

Click on the top pic in your frames and scroll down to the bottom frame and hold shift and click on the bottom frame to select all of them.

Right click on one of the frames and click convert to smart object. It should turn your frames into something like this.

From here we can sharpen our gifs and also colour them pretty easily. I recommend not using an action for sharpening as every anime is different and have different levels of sharpening involved. Click on filters, sharpen and then smart sharpen.

Change the sharpening to these settings

There is a reason I am not using 500 by 0.3 and that is because in my gifs I like to sharpen twice. First being between 200-350 on 0.3 and then the second sharpening layer 40-60 by 0.5 This makes the sharpening thicker and looks better imo but if you want to just use 500 by 0.3 knock your selves out. Ok here is the step a lot of people struggle with. DO NOT OVER SHARPEN YOUR GIF. I’ve seen gifs and made plenty of gifs myself where the sharpening is so much the a white line appears and makes the entire gif look ugly. If your gif is over sharpened and you can see a white line over the real line then lower the amount of sharpening you use until it is gone.

Here is how it should NOT look like

Here is how it SHOULD look like

Here is the original to compare.

Your smart object should look something like this now

If you only used 500 by 0.3 then there wont be another smart sharpen on top and there will only be one. This step is optional but I like to use surface blur on my gifs as it makes everything smoother and better looking. go to filters, blur and then at the bottom surface blur. Here are my surface blur settings

MAKE SURE YOU KEEP YOUR RADIUS 3 AND KEEP YOUR THRESHOLD BETWEEN 3-6. I’ve seen plenty of gifs where people use waaaaay too much surface blur which make the gif look too soft and A LOT of detail is lost if you put it too high.

OK here comes the hardest part of making and anime gif…. that is the colouring. Learning how to colour and make a certain scene look nice takes time and experience. You have to learn what enhances the right colours and what keeps the filesize and grain low. If you are starting out I HIGHLY recommend using PSDS made by other tumblr users and colouring your scenes with them. This lets you see what they used to make the gif look good and shows you what you could use later on when you are colouring gifs yourself. Slowly but surely you WILL learn how to colour by yourself and will not need the help of other PSDS. I mainly use PSDS made by myself so I know which PSD works with each different gif.

Here is the gif without colouring

Here is the gif with colouring.

Ok once you are done colouring your gif you are done! Congrats if you have made it this far, there is only a bit left to go.

Go to file and save for web and devices.

Here are my settings when making gifs MAKE SURE IT IS ON PATTERN. Pattern makes the gifs the best quality it can possibly be and looks much much better than diffusion, noise and no dither. I would advise staying away from them ESPECIALLY NO DITHER as it makes colours all over the screen. You should only switch between adaptive and selective also. Check to see which one gives the least amount of grain before saving your gif or if your gif is over the size limit then pick the only which makes the size go lower. Never turn transparency off as it also bloats the file size.

If your file size is 2mb or over 2mb (you can check here if it is)

(The filesize on this gif is 1.2mb) then you have the option to lower the colours of your gif. Just click on this button and click optimize to file size.

Write 1999 and click ok.

This will lower the colours of your gif and making it fit under 2mb. Although I would recommend NOT using this method until last resort as the gif becomes ugly sometimes. This is also why I said at the start to keep your frames under 30 as less frames = less filesize.

MAKE SURE YOUR LOOPING OPTION IS ON FOREVER. Theres nothing worse than making a good gif and making it only play once.

Play your gif and see if it is the way you want it to be and then click save. Voila! you are done and ready to upload your gif to Tumblr.

FINAL RESULT

Hope this guide helped and encouraged people who didn’t know how to make gifs or people struggling and looking for advice make better looking gifs and learn different techniques. I hope to see plenty of great looking anime gifs in the future!

Thank you for reading,

If you have any questions then feel free to ask me Otoyomegatari