basic tumblr gifmaking tutorial
the thumbnail is that because i don't know what to upload
notes i was using if you need a text guide:
To make a gif in Photoshop, the first step is converting the clip itself. Ideally your sources are going to be 1080p above so that it remains
high quality post-resizing.
You're going to want to go to the file menu -- which is the first option on the toolbar up here. Hover over Import and click on
"Video Frames To Layers." Select whatever clip you want to use and trim accordingly until you have the specific region you want to
convert into a gif.
Click Limit To Every 2 Frames. This is mostly for optimization's sake-- Tumblr doesn't upload gifs above 10mb, and it's ideal to keep it even lower so that they play smoothly. You lose basically nothing with 2 frames, so do that, and if it isn't checked by default click Make Frame Animation.
Now that you're in the editing menu itself, you can now start to resize. Crop whatever region you want to focus on using the cropping tool over here, and once you're done you can decide on what resolution you want your gif to be. If you want one gif per row on your tumblr posts, it has to be 540px. If you want two gifs per row, it has to be 268. If you want three, it has to be 177px, 178px, and 177px respectively. This is largely a matter of optimization as well; the lower the resolution, the lower the size.
Once you've decided on that, go to the timeline. There's a little button over here with three bars that pull up the frame animation menu. Select every frame and set the delay rate to 0.05. Not 0.5, 0.05. This is the standard for most gifs on tumblr and the most naturalistic without being laggy.
Now, to actually be able to edit a gif visually, which will come in later, you want to click these three buttons below the timeline to convert it into video. Don't reconvert it to a frame animation at any point, this'll freeze the gif. Go up to the toolbar and click All Layers on the Select menu. Go to the Layer menu and convert it into a smart object. This makes it so each layer is grouped in and you can edit them all the same time.
That concludes the converting part of gifmaking. Once you've figured out how to do that, you can usually just leave the process to an action. If you're unfamiliar, Actions are basically photoshop's way of automating a process. You can make them by adding a new Action on this menu over here and doing all the steps I've just listed out. Here's an example of me using one; it's a good way to cut on time, especially considering this is the most tedious and repetitive part of gifs.
Everything past this is largely up to preference, but I'll detail how I do it as a starting point.
You're going to notice that the gif looks significantly worse due to resizing. To remedy this, what I do is go over the the filter menu,
select Smart Sharpen under the Sharpen menu. I'm gonna skip over this just because I'm illiterate when it comes to photo-editing lingo and can't explain my process in a way that makes sense. I usually do one layer of smart sharpening and then another, making sure there's enough contrast and that the parts that matter don't blur into each other. Since the quality at this point is still pretty poor, I usually add a layer of noise to distract from the compression. 1-2% is the ideal; anything past that is distracting. So now you can turn both of those off under the menu here and play to compare.
Now let's go over to brightness and contrast. It's still looking a little dull over here, so I'm gonna fiddle with the settings until you can see what's going on a little better. Maybe some exposure editing as well. The longer I look at this the more green the seal looks, so I'm going to go fuss with Selective Color until that reaches a less-lime adjacent shade. Again, skipping/speeding over this, just because I don't have the language to explain in any meaningful way.
Now that you're satisfied with your gif, go over to File again. On export you're going to see Save To Web (Legacy). Click that, and you'll be led to this menu. I leave most of this untouched, but over here you can play a preview of your gif before it renders. Save that, and you're basically done. Here's the gif playing now. Hope this makes sense and that it makes gifmaking in photoshop significantly less confusing. This program sucks and it's hard to navigate it on the first run especially.