Soooo i see a lot of people make little moving gifs.... Does anyone know if its hard to make those?? and how they are created??
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Soooo i see a lot of people make little moving gifs.... Does anyone know if its hard to make those?? and how they are created??
I used to make gifs aaaall the time several years ago.
There are some websites where you can upload a short video clip to make a gif out of it, and those usually suffice if you don't care about quality.
But, if you're looking to make, like... high-quality, edited gifs for Tumblr photosets or something, you'd need a few things of your own.
If you're like me and you wanna make gifs out of scenes from movies/TV shows, it'd be best for you to have a software that allows you to download torrents and keep track of the videos you download. I used to use a program called Vuze, I think. Then, unfortunately, the main website I used to download my torrents from got shut down a few years back I believe, and I wouldn't know where to go these days to find safe, free downloads for full movies in HD quality... :/
Anyway, you'd also need a video editing software so that you can crop entire 2-hour movies down to just something like 15 seconds (or however long the scene you wanna capture is).
I'm sure there are other programs in which you can create gifs, but the one I used (and I think most other people use?) is Photoshop.
Basically what you do once you have the desired scene cropped out is open up Photoshop and go to File > Import > Video Frames to Layers. Assuming you're gonna make multiple gifs out of a 15-second scene (making just one high-quality gif out of a 15-second clip would create an [i]enormous[/i] file), you'd start with selecting only maybe 1-3 seconds worth of material, and once you click "OK", Photoshop will convert the video's frames into layers on a single image.
In order to view the gif in motion, you have to go to Window > Timeline. A window will then appear at the bottom of the screen where you can play and pause the gif as needed. From here, you can also change the delay time between frames so that you can control how slow or fast the gif moves.
The rest is just a matter of editing (mostly via Image > Adjustments). I literally do not remember how, but there's a way to create an invisible layer on top of the image where you can edit stuff like color and light and sharpness, and it applies those edits to ALL other layers beneath the invisible one. So you don't have to go through all 45 layers and change the color balance one by one, lol.
Adding text to a gif is, I think, as simple as just putting the text box on top of all the layers? Eh, might require the same type of layer you use to edit all layers at once. It's also a little more complicated if you want the text to appear and disappear (or fade in and out) depending on what layers you're viewing, and I don't at all remember how to make that happen.
And, just for the record, I figured out rather late that you should sharpen the gif [i]before[/i] resizing it. When you first open the file in Photoshop, the image will take up the entire window (after all, it's from an HD movie, and movies are meant to be watched fullscreen), so you have to resize it to something reasonable like a width of 250 pixels. What I started doing was using Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen to an extreme extent so that the full image looked super rough and grainy. But once you make the image many times smaller, it doesn't look grainy anymore. It actually looks... super clear. You'd probably have to sharpen a tiny bit more after resizing, but that's it. Sharpening it before resizing does most of the work. I have no idea why this works, but it does.
Here are two gifs I made when I used to do all of the sharpening after resizing:
[img]http://68.media.tumblr.com/e7b25df5a47351e8c193b48e8a4c53bb/tumblr_mj2ilxLZ1U1r4uhnco1_250.gif[/img]
[img]http://68.media.tumblr.com/2142728ad103b4d7fad50cc9e0b599be/tumblr_mjies4QAP81r4uhnco3_r2_250.gif[/img]
And two gifs that I made when I started sharpening before resizing:
[img]http://68.media.tumblr.com/131da92395969e3b1c946fdd30a1f83a/tumblr_mlutfnNWOa1r4uhnco5_250.gif[/img]
[img]https://68.media.tumblr.com/6d77e279eddffa1bbb65aff9c2d6a3e9/tumblr_inline_mkszrm6u2g1qz4rgp.gif[/img]
(I used to be very into Tolkien, shhhhh...)
You can see that there's something slightly... [i]chunkier[/i] about the first two gifs. The second two are considerably less rough-looking.
Once you're all done with your gif, you DON'T go to File > Save As. Instead, you go to File > Export > Save For Web. In the window that appears, you have just a few more things to edit (if necessary), and you can preview how the gif will look online. If you're looking to upload to something like Tumblr, for instance, there'll be a file size restriction. I believe it's different now, but back in the day, Tumblr wouldn't allow any single gif over 1MB. So if you had a gif that's just over 1MB, you'd either want to go back and delete some frames, or while in the export window, reduce the amount of colors used in the gif. Sometimes, going from 256 to 128 colors doesn't make a significant visual difference at all, but will greatly reduce the file size. You could also try reducing the dither percentage, but that usually noticeably reduces the quality as well.
Anyway, after you've saved that one gif, you go all the way back to the beginning and do the same thing over again with the next couple seconds of the scene you're recreating. And you keep doing that until you have a full gifset!
WOW, AM I RAMBLING.
Just, uh. Keep in mind, I taught myself how to make gifs with only prior knowledge of Photoshop and a total of probably 7 minutes spent skimming online video tutorials. I wouldn't at all be surprised if there are easier ways to go about certain things in the process of gif-making. Also, I may very well sound like some kind of ignorant fool to people who know this stuff better than I do. All I know is that I had my own methods, and they worked quite well for me.
I used to make gifs aaaall the time several years ago.
There are some websites where you can upload a short video clip to make a gif out of it, and those usually suffice if you don't care about quality.
But, if you're looking to make, like... high-quality, edited gifs for Tumblr photosets or something, you'd need a few things of your own.
If you're like me and you wanna make gifs out of scenes from movies/TV shows, it'd be best for you to have a software that allows you to download torrents and keep track of the videos you download. I used to use a program called Vuze, I think. Then, unfortunately, the main website I used to download my torrents from got shut down a few years back I believe, and I wouldn't know where to go these days to find safe, free downloads for full movies in HD quality... :/
Anyway, you'd also need a video editing software so that you can crop entire 2-hour movies down to just something like 15 seconds (or however long the scene you wanna capture is).
I'm sure there are other programs in which you can create gifs, but the one I used (and I think most other people use?) is Photoshop.
Basically what you do once you have the desired scene cropped out is open up Photoshop and go to File > Import > Video Frames to Layers. Assuming you're gonna make multiple gifs out of a 15-second scene (making just one high-quality gif out of a 15-second clip would create an enormous file), you'd start with selecting only maybe 1-3 seconds worth of material, and once you click "OK", Photoshop will convert the video's frames into layers on a single image.
In order to view the gif in motion, you have to go to Window > Timeline. A window will then appear at the bottom of the screen where you can play and pause the gif as needed. From here, you can also change the delay time between frames so that you can control how slow or fast the gif moves.
The rest is just a matter of editing (mostly via Image > Adjustments). I literally do not remember how, but there's a way to create an invisible layer on top of the image where you can edit stuff like color and light and sharpness, and it applies those edits to ALL other layers beneath the invisible one. So you don't have to go through all 45 layers and change the color balance one by one, lol.
Adding text to a gif is, I think, as simple as just putting the text box on top of all the layers? Eh, might require the same type of layer you use to edit all layers at once. It's also a little more complicated if you want the text to appear and disappear (or fade in and out) depending on what layers you're viewing, and I don't at all remember how to make that happen.
And, just for the record, I figured out rather late that you should sharpen the gif before resizing it. When you first open the file in Photoshop, the image will take up the entire window (after all, it's from an HD movie, and movies are meant to be watched fullscreen), so you have to resize it to something reasonable like a width of 250 pixels. What I started doing was using Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen to an extreme extent so that the full image looked super rough and grainy. But once you make the image many times smaller, it doesn't look grainy anymore. It actually looks... super clear. You'd probably have to sharpen a tiny bit more after resizing, but that's it. Sharpening it before resizing does most of the work. I have no idea why this works, but it does.
Here are two gifs I made when I used to do all of the sharpening after resizing:
And two gifs that I made when I started sharpening before resizing:
(I used to be very into Tolkien, shhhhh...)
You can see that there's something slightly... chunkier about the first two gifs. The second two are considerably less rough-looking.
Once you're all done with your gif, you DON'T go to File > Save As. Instead, you go to File > Export > Save For Web. In the window that appears, you have just a few more things to edit (if necessary), and you can preview how the gif will look online. If you're looking to upload to something like Tumblr, for instance, there'll be a file size restriction. I believe it's different now, but back in the day, Tumblr wouldn't allow any single gif over 1MB. So if you had a gif that's just over 1MB, you'd either want to go back and delete some frames, or while in the export window, reduce the amount of colors used in the gif. Sometimes, going from 256 to 128 colors doesn't make a significant visual difference at all, but will greatly reduce the file size. You could also try reducing the dither percentage, but that usually noticeably reduces the quality as well.
Anyway, after you've saved that one gif, you go all the way back to the beginning and do the same thing over again with the next couple seconds of the scene you're recreating. And you keep doing that until you have a full gifset!
WOW, AM I RAMBLING.
Just, uh. Keep in mind, I taught myself how to make gifs with only prior knowledge of Photoshop and a total of probably 7 minutes spent skimming online video tutorials. I wouldn't at all be surprised if there are easier ways to go about certain things in the process of gif-making. Also, I may very well sound like some kind of ignorant fool to people who know this stuff better than I do. All I know is that I had my own methods, and they worked quite well for me.
There are some websites where you can upload a short video clip to make a gif out of it, and those usually suffice if you don't care about quality.
But, if you're looking to make, like... high-quality, edited gifs for Tumblr photosets or something, you'd need a few things of your own.
If you're like me and you wanna make gifs out of scenes from movies/TV shows, it'd be best for you to have a software that allows you to download torrents and keep track of the videos you download. I used to use a program called Vuze, I think. Then, unfortunately, the main website I used to download my torrents from got shut down a few years back I believe, and I wouldn't know where to go these days to find safe, free downloads for full movies in HD quality... :/
Anyway, you'd also need a video editing software so that you can crop entire 2-hour movies down to just something like 15 seconds (or however long the scene you wanna capture is).
I'm sure there are other programs in which you can create gifs, but the one I used (and I think most other people use?) is Photoshop.
Basically what you do once you have the desired scene cropped out is open up Photoshop and go to File > Import > Video Frames to Layers. Assuming you're gonna make multiple gifs out of a 15-second scene (making just one high-quality gif out of a 15-second clip would create an enormous file), you'd start with selecting only maybe 1-3 seconds worth of material, and once you click "OK", Photoshop will convert the video's frames into layers on a single image.
In order to view the gif in motion, you have to go to Window > Timeline. A window will then appear at the bottom of the screen where you can play and pause the gif as needed. From here, you can also change the delay time between frames so that you can control how slow or fast the gif moves.
The rest is just a matter of editing (mostly via Image > Adjustments). I literally do not remember how, but there's a way to create an invisible layer on top of the image where you can edit stuff like color and light and sharpness, and it applies those edits to ALL other layers beneath the invisible one. So you don't have to go through all 45 layers and change the color balance one by one, lol.
Adding text to a gif is, I think, as simple as just putting the text box on top of all the layers? Eh, might require the same type of layer you use to edit all layers at once. It's also a little more complicated if you want the text to appear and disappear (or fade in and out) depending on what layers you're viewing, and I don't at all remember how to make that happen.
And, just for the record, I figured out rather late that you should sharpen the gif before resizing it. When you first open the file in Photoshop, the image will take up the entire window (after all, it's from an HD movie, and movies are meant to be watched fullscreen), so you have to resize it to something reasonable like a width of 250 pixels. What I started doing was using Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen to an extreme extent so that the full image looked super rough and grainy. But once you make the image many times smaller, it doesn't look grainy anymore. It actually looks... super clear. You'd probably have to sharpen a tiny bit more after resizing, but that's it. Sharpening it before resizing does most of the work. I have no idea why this works, but it does.
Here are two gifs I made when I used to do all of the sharpening after resizing:
And two gifs that I made when I started sharpening before resizing:
(I used to be very into Tolkien, shhhhh...)
You can see that there's something slightly... chunkier about the first two gifs. The second two are considerably less rough-looking.
Once you're all done with your gif, you DON'T go to File > Save As. Instead, you go to File > Export > Save For Web. In the window that appears, you have just a few more things to edit (if necessary), and you can preview how the gif will look online. If you're looking to upload to something like Tumblr, for instance, there'll be a file size restriction. I believe it's different now, but back in the day, Tumblr wouldn't allow any single gif over 1MB. So if you had a gif that's just over 1MB, you'd either want to go back and delete some frames, or while in the export window, reduce the amount of colors used in the gif. Sometimes, going from 256 to 128 colors doesn't make a significant visual difference at all, but will greatly reduce the file size. You could also try reducing the dither percentage, but that usually noticeably reduces the quality as well.
Anyway, after you've saved that one gif, you go all the way back to the beginning and do the same thing over again with the next couple seconds of the scene you're recreating. And you keep doing that until you have a full gifset!
WOW, AM I RAMBLING.
Just, uh. Keep in mind, I taught myself how to make gifs with only prior knowledge of Photoshop and a total of probably 7 minutes spent skimming online video tutorials. I wouldn't at all be surprised if there are easier ways to go about certain things in the process of gif-making. Also, I may very well sound like some kind of ignorant fool to people who know this stuff better than I do. All I know is that I had my own methods, and they worked quite well for me.