Gif Tutorial

Like I promised, here is a .gif tutorial for those who asked. I don’t know how “good” it is, but hopefully it’ll help someone learn. If you have any questions, let me know.

First thing you have to do is get the program to make gifs. I use Adobe ImageReady (it came with my Adobe photoshop). Some other programs that are good to use are Adobe Photoshop CS4 (or one of the CS#’s) and GIMP. There are probably other good programs out there, but those are the best ones I’ve heard of.
You can buy the program or download it (visit isohunt.com or Google ‘Adobe ImageReady + torrents’; there are many places to find torrents). It’s better to do one of those two then do one of the __ day trials in the long run.
After you have your program all installed, your next step is to find what you want to cap. Just like the gif making programs, there are many choices out there to use to cap your video. I use VLC Player. Some use PowerDVD. Again, it’s up to you.
If you use VLC Player like I do (and this is similar to almost all the video players out there), when capping video, you can change the settings so you can cap pressing one button instead of pausing and going to the top to press “Take Snapshot”.
You can see how to change the settings here. It’s quite simple. I changed mine to the “s” key, but you can pick whichever letter you’d like.
After you change the hotkeys, you want to make sure your caps go into the specific folder you want:
You can change the file prefix, directory, et cetera. I would keep the format “png” for best quality, although that does depend on the video.
Okay! You have your caps done. Now, you want to make gifs!
Open up Adobe ImageReady. Go to “File > Import > Folder as Frames…”. Find the folder of caps you’ve made and open that.
As you can see, your caps are now uploaded and in order.
Now, edit your caps. While in Image Ready, I would for this gif crop the black bars away. You press the button I’ve circled in red to do so:
Now, you’re image is crop. The next thing to do is make it the size you want (or the size that will work on tumblr). The caps I’m using for this gif are not very big, so I don’t have to fiddle with the size as much. But if you’re using caps from movies or a HQ file, you’ll have to resize a lot.
On tumblr, if you are making a big gif to post as a photo, the image should be around a width of 500 pixels or less. If it’s bigger, it will not show up as a gif. If you’re making a gif to use in text posts or replies, it can be any size smaller than 500px, as long as it shows up.
I enlarged my gif because I wanted to to be bigger, so it’s currently 500px w, 207px h. As long as the quality doesn’t get grainy, you can enlarge all you would like.
Let’s say you want to add coloring to your gif. To do that, you’d go to Photoshop (unless you are using Adobe Photoshop CS#, which allows you to do everything in one place). Click the button circled in red (or go to “File > Jump To > Adobe Photoshop 7.0”):
While in Photoshop, you can fiddle around with the layers, add curves, add text, et cetera et cetera. Each gif/graphic maker is different. You can do whatever you want. Just make sure that all layers are above the last cap:
For this gif, I’m not going to add anything to it. So, back to ImageReady..
After you’ve cropped everything, resized it, edited it however you want, the next step is to adjust the speed. Near the bottom, you see a bar with all your caps on it. Right-click and highlight every cap. Then, right click. You’ll see it gives you options for what the speed should be. Click “Other”. You’ll get this:
In most cases, if you want the gif to be normal speed, it’s best to leave it at 0.12-0.16 seconds. But try some things out. For this gif, I’m leaving it at 0.14 seconds:
Now, you want to try it out and see what it looks like. Click this button (or go to “File > Preview In > Internet Explorer/Other if you don’t use IE, click ‘Other’ and find your browser there):
You’ll get a page that looks like this:
For gifs to work on tumblr, the gif size must be under 500k. If it’s not, it won’t work at all. With gifs, sometimes, you can only have 7 caps. Other times, you could have 15+ and it’ll work at 500w. It all depends. You might have to delete caps or resize greatly. Just try whatever you can to make it work. Obviously, this gif will work fine, so it’s time to save :) Before you save, if your gif is in color, make sure on the right side of IR that it looks like this:
It’ll make sure your gif is at the best quality. For black and white gifs, it should be around 106ish (again, this is different in other programs, but works for ImageReady).
To save, go to “File > Save Optimized As…” and save it where ever you’d like. Make sure the file is a .gif though! :D
Voilà! You’re gif is done:
That wasn’t too hard, wasn’t it? :)