How to make gifs in Photoshop (my way)

[angelic_wounds]

So, my lovely friend Michelle asked me to make a tutorial for her on how I make gifs. Now, I had some people asking about that kind of work, since I spent a lot of time on Photoshop lately. Anyway, Mich, let's get started, darling!

What you will need:

1. Photoshop (For this tutorial, I use my version of this program, Photoshop CS6)
2. KMPlayer (the greatest program for screencap capture if you ask me. You can download it here.)
3. Basic Photoshop knowledge, although I will make this tutorial very as much in detail as I can.

So here we go.

• Open up your Photoshop and your KMPlayer.
• Select the video you want to make the gif from and upload it on the KMPlayer.
• Now, 10 seconds before the scene starts, get ready to screencap. Click Cltr + G. This window will pop up.

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• Make sure to check the numbers to extract (set them on continuously), select the every frame option, and select the folder you want the images to extract to.
• When the scene starts, press start, and then stop at the end of the scene. The frames, hopefully, will have been successfully capped. :D
• Now on to Photoshop.
• Go to File > Scripts > Load Files into Stack

• WARNING: Some Photoshop programs, which have been downloaded from the internet and such, have problems with this option. My old Photoshop CS5 always showed an error whenever I selected Load Into Stack option. So, hopefully, yours will work, If it doesn't though, there is a slower and more painful way to upload your images, as seen in here.
• Ok, so, if the window pops up, click on Browse
• Select the files you want to upload in order to make your gif, and click OK. Wait for the files to upload, do not click on anything, because the loading will stop if you do.
• Once the loading is finished, go to Window > Timeline. Now the timeline will be visible to the bottom of your Photoshop panel. If the option is set on Video Timeline, switch it to Frame Timeline.

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• Do not ask why I have Ron Burgundy in there, I am making a gifset!

• OKAY IF THE ABOVE METHOD DOES NOT WORK, DO THIS: If your video file is an mp4 or avi type, you can do an alternative thing. Go to File > Import > Video Frames to Layers.
• After you have selected the video you wish to gif, a window will pop up. If you want to capture only a specific portion of the video, select the bullet Selected Range Only. Then, tweak the little black pointers, in order to capture the space of the scene you wish to gif. (BEWARE: Videos with longer duration will capture a lot of space, even if your pointers are very close to each other. Photoshop will only take up to 500 frames. It is up to you to cut the video down.)
• Image for more help:
  

Anyway, now comes the editing part.

Editing and making your gif.

1. As soon as the layers have been uploaded, go to the right side of your timeline layer, where you will see this icon
   . Click on it and select Make Frames From Layers.,
2. Now, your layers are set but in the reverse mode. To undo that, click again on the little icon shown above, and select Reverse Frames.
3. Ok, now to the editing. First of all, your image may need some resizing and/or cropping. If you want to choose a specific portion of the image, go to your Tools Palette, and select the Crop Tool. Then, drag your mouse and hold on the left click, and drag it to your image in the desired position.
4. If the image is as you want to be but not on the size you desire it, go to Image > Image Size. There, make sure you have the Constrain Proportions option selected, otherwise your image will come out disproportioned. Type your selected size (in pixels) and click ok.

OR

• Now, go to your timeline. If there are any frames you don't want, you can delete them. Select the frames you want to discard on your timeline frame, by clicking on one and then, holding Shift or Cltr. select the frames. Go to your timeline icon on the far right and select Delete Frames.
• Ok, this part may seem tricky, but if you are going to edit your image afterwards, it will ease you out a lot of troubles. Once you have erased your frames, go to your timeline icon, and this time click Flatten Frames Into Layers.

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• Once you have done that, go to your layers palette, and select the layers of the image NOT THE FRAMES. Select all the layers, and delete them by either pressing delete or clicking on the small garbage can on the bottom of your palette. AGAIN DO NOT DELETE THE FRAMES.

• Now, for our last part, we are going to set the time frame. If you press play, on the bottom left corner of your timeline layer, you will see that the gif runs way too fast. We will fix this by clicking on the Timeline icon. Click on Select All Frames.

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• Do you see on the bottom of your frames the little 0 sec letters? Great. Click on the arrow next to it, and set the time to 0,1 sec. You can always write your custom time, but usually 0,1 is the best one.
• After you have done that, DO NOT FORGET to put the play mode into Forever, found on the bottom left corner. If you don't your gif won't play continuously.
• If you choose, you can now add actions, psds, textures etc. Make your own colouring too! I have another tutorial on colouring, which can be found here. Experiment with each scene, cause some need more tweaking than others! You can find tons of psds & textures in various tumblr blogs, such as yeahps, itsphotoshop, chaoticresources etc. Once you have downloaded a psd, simply open it in photoshop and drag it to your gif. (REMEMBER TO SELECT YOUR VERY FIRST FRAME ON YOUR TIMELINE BEFORE YOU DRAG IT, OTHERWISE IT WILL ONLY COLOUR ONE FRAME OF YOUR GIF!)

• Almost done! Now, to save, go to File > Save for Web. On the window that appears, you have to take notice of the size of your image. If it is larger than 1MB, it won't play on Tumblr (but if you want to use it anywhere else, that's ok). To fix that, you can either delete more frames from your gif to make it smaller, or resize, or edit some colours out. However, if you like your gif as it is, you can optimise the size of it in the expense of some of its quality.
• To optimise the file, go to your upper right corner and click on the Optimise Menu icon. Select Optimise to File Size. Then, on the opening window type 1000K on the Desired Size case, and click OK.
• Click on Save and you are done!

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Wow, this was my first ever tutorial! If you have any questions, please ask me. As far as editing goes, you can always add PSDs and textures to make your gif look beautiful. Hope I helped some people out there. Till next time!