gif tutorial (for PS5) 

I was asked to make a tutorial on how I make gif, I’m going to try to explain to you guys step by step how I make my gifs, you can play around with a gif in order to make nice effects & stuff but I’m just going to explain the basics.

You need:

• Photoshop CS5 (you can download here)
• The PSD I’m using is one I made, I might give it out soon.
• You can find the video I used here.

Step One: Download you movie/TV show/video that you want to make gifs with. If you’re going to download a video from Youtube, got to keepvid.com, paste the URL of the video into the download bar, hit download and wait for further instructions. You will want to download the highest resolution of MP4.

Step Two: Open photoshop CS5 (if you haven’t already)

Step Three: Go to FILE>IMPORT>VIDEO FRAMES TO LAYERS

Step Four: A new window should open, find the folder where your downloaded video was saved (usually in your downloads folder), click it, and hit LOAD. If your video doesn’t show, try typing the name of the video and that should work.

Step Five: Now another new window should pop up, set your settings as mine and press play.

Step Six: Hold down the SHIFT key while moving the slider to highlight the part of the video that you’re going to gif. When you’re doing this, I recommend highlighting a little bit after where you want your gif to end just to be sure you have every frame you want. Your highlighted part should look like this: (where I have the box) and hit OK.

Step Seven: Your frames should be put into a new document. Resize as you desire. Keep the width at 500px. Go to WINDOW>ANIMATION. Your frames should be put into the animation palette.

Step Eight: Here comes the pain in the ass part, sharpening your frames. There are some tricks to sharpening your frames all at once, but I sadly don’t know how to do that. So, what you’re going to do is, click on the first frame on your animation palette, go to your layers palette and click on the frame that has the little eye showing and go to FILTER>SHARPEN>SHARPEN. Repeat with the rest of your frames, and to make life easier just keep hitting CTRL+F. It takes forever, but it will be worth it in the long run.

Step Nine: To change how fast or slow you want your gif to go, select the first frame of your gif, hold SHIFT and select the last frame on your gif. They should now all be highlighted in your animation palette. Click on the small black triangle on the bottom right hand corner of one of your frames and select whatever time frame you’d like. To see how it looks, click the PLAY button.

Step Ten: Be sure your gif doesn’t have too many frames. I recomment the max of 15 frames. And I usually make it 0.2 seconds fast. After you do that, you can add some colorings, use a PSD or leave as is.

Step Eleven: Now you can save and upload! To save go to FILE>SAVE FOR WEB & DEVICES and a new window should open, set your settings as mine and click SAVE.

Note: Tumblr limits the gifs to 900KB so if you want to upload your gif but it’s larger than 900KB you may have to erase some frames, make it smaller or lower the colors. If you’re going to lower the colors keep it between 100-256 depending on the gif. Going lower than 100 will make the gif horrible quality. You can also make it black and white.

You have now made your first gif! Here’s my result: