josephine12cute’s GIF tutorial

FIRST OF ALL, I’M A PHOTOSHOP USER SO THIS TUTORIAL IS FOR PEOPLE WHO USE PHOTOSHOP LIKE ME, OBVIOUSLY. But because I love you guys so much, I searched for available tutorials in other programs. I found tutorials for free softwares like Photoscape, Jasc Animation Shop and GIMP. If you use another software and would like to lend my amazing researching skills, feel free to ask me :)

REMEMBER THAT THIS IS HOW I MAKE MY OWN GIF. IF YOU’RE NOT COMFORTABLE WITH MY OWN STYLE, THERE ARE A LOT MORE BETTER TUTORIALS AVAILABLE :))

What you’ll need:

• A video you want to make a GIF out of with (kekekeke :P kill me nao I’ll be using Ryan Higa’s “Daily Life of a Basketballer” as reference)
• Site or software that lets you download videos like KeepVid, Savevid or ClipGrab
• Photoshop (you can get one here and here although I got mine from a different source that’s no longer available lol haha)
• Basic Photoshop knowledge (I explain so bad that its better if you’re at least familiar with it)
• Latest version of Quicktime (so Photoshop can import your videos which what I’ll explain later)
• Video editing software like these (for trimming videos in case needed)
• Video converter like this (in case needed… again I’ll explain later why…)

Finished Product:

ALRIGHT, LET’S GET STARTED!!!! :)))))))

1. Go to YouTube > find the video you like > copy it’s URL > download the video (I’ll use KeepVid as my video downloader). NOTE: I prefer to download 1080p HD videos and they are REALLY HUGE in size and resolution. But if you want a smaller size and resolution, I suggest downloading MP4 480p.
2. Using a video editing software (Windows Live Movie Maker, in my case… but a lot will do too), choose the part you like to be a GIF and trim your video. NOTE(S): Again, I prefer 1080p videos, but it’s up to you to choose how you like your video to be saved. I’ll be saving it as 480p so the resolution is smaller :) / Photoshop can already trim the video for you but sometimes it can take a while (or maybe like forever) and might even crash so it’s better to trim the video and make things secure.
3. Remember that Photoshop usually only opens MOV, AVI, MP4, MPEG video format. Make sure your video is in one of these formats. So use a video converter if needed. But for some reason, AVI appears all white. And my Photoshop crashes when I open an MP4 file. So I’m using MOV file type of videos. You’re lucky if you have a video editing software that lets you choose a specific file type, BTW. Now excuse me while I convert my sample video into MOV.
4. Open Photoshop > File > Import > Video Frames into Layers… > select your video > check the Limit to Every _ frames box > input 3 or 4. NOTE(S): If you weren’t able to trim the video in the exact way you wanted it to be, you can try using “Selected Range Only” option when importing your video. Figure out how it works by yourself. / In the “Limit to Every _ frames”, 3 and 4 is my suggested value to avoid having many unnecessary frames. I use 4 most of the time. The higher the number, the lesser the frames and the movement. It depends on the video you’re working with.
5. This is the first part of editing! :)) Everything can be done in random order… You can crop (press “C”) and/or resize (Image > Image Size) your GIF. Remove unwanted frames (but I won’t be doing it for this one) and change the delay second of every frame by 0.2 seconds (click the first frame > press shift > click the last frame > hover on the seconds delay > right click > choose 0.2). NOTE(S): The maximum width for Tumblr GIF is 500px and the maximum height is 700px. But it’s usually the width that needs to be adjusted. / I suggest 0.2 as the second delay for frames because it’s not too fast and not too slow. But it’s up to you if you want to increase (slower) or decrease (faster) the number of seconds.
6. Now this is the second and fun editing part! :D You can do whatever you want with your GIF! :)) You can adjust it’s colors however you want and add text. The editing is up to you! I’m going to adjust the colors, add my watermark and then resize my GIF into 300px width.  NOTE(S): I don’t really adjust the colors of my own GIFs, I swear! / Always remember to put the color adjustment and text layers on top of all layers so the whole GIF will display the color adjustment and the text.
7. When you’re ready to save your GIF, go to File > Save for Web & Devices… Tumblr GIFs should be under 500KB (for me, the best size would be at least under 495KB) and the following picture shows where you can see the current size of your GIF:  Notice that my GIF is above 500KB. To make the GIF under 500KB, I usually tweak one or more of these:  The way you see it as it is makes your GIF in it’s highest quality and by adjusting some of them, your GIF’s size will decrease but it may also lose it’s nice quality. It’s hard for me to explain on what happens when you adjust these options. See it for yourselves instead… Now going back to my GIF, what I did was to adjust the Lossy into 1 and voila! My GIF became 456.1KB :)))) After the further adjustments, just hit the save button and name your file! :D
8. And here’s our finished product :”>

THINGS THAT CAN MAKE YOUR GIF UNDER 500KB:

• less animation frames (I usually go below 20 frames when I’m making 250px GIFs and below 12 frames for 500px ones… the sizes I mentioned are widths)
• smaller resolution (I love making large 500px ones and I hate it when I have to scale them down)
• using color adjustments / black & white / less colors (just don’t overdo them or else, your GIF might even increase in size)
• adjusting the Lossy, Web Snap, etc… (the ones I showed earlier)
• using the “Optimize to File Size…” then input your desired file size (although this is not reliable all the time and can even make your GIF in extremely bad quality)
• those are all the stuff I can think off…

Please don’t be mad at me if you find my tutorial a little bad. It’s hard to explain in English >_<

And please do not repost this tutorial at all. Likes and reblogs are what I only appreciate. I took enough time and effort to make this tutorial.