How to make a gif [photoshop only]

To be honest i don’t consider myself any expert at gifing (accept now that this is a word because i will be using it a fair bit) but i have gotten a couple people asking me how i make my gifs. so i thought i’d give it a shot to answer the best i can. if you have any questions or encounter any problems let me know and we can figure something out - the entire process of how i gif was learned through not being able to do things others could. anywho, allonsy!
EDIT: as of late i’ve gotten some questions about this tutorial, please look under my gifhelp tag to see if your question has already been answered before asking me for help!
EDIT EDIT: IF YOU ARE USING CS6/A MAC PLEASE GO TO MY NEW GIF TUTORIAL HERE. both tutorials are split into two parts capping & creating, so if you’re capping on a windows, and then creating in CS6, follow the capping part of this tutorial and the creating part of the other. make sense?

CAPPING - WINDOWS
1) before we get started go download photoshop cs5 and kmplayer, also go find some  fairly basic psd’s you can use to color your shtuff :3

2) open a video file in kmplayer and find the part you want to gif. i would recommend using 720p videos if you want higher quality but it’s not necessary! i’m going to use a clip from amy in victory of the daleks so i find the spot where i want my gif to start and pause it.

3) now to capture some frames, hit ctrl+g on your keyboard to open the frame capture window. i have my settings set like so, but you can change where your frames are saved to by clicking the icon next to the “extract to” area.

4) hit start and then go play your video, stop it when the part you want to gif is done. one thing i should mention is taking the screencaps might slow down your computer a bit, resulting in the video lagging as the shots are taken, once you stop taking the captures the video will go faster to make up for lost time. just keep calm and carry on.

CREATING - CS5
5) okay, so now go to photoshop and locate where your frames were saved, for me they go under documents -> kmplayer -> capture, so open up that folder and select the frames you want to gif. i try to keep it from a 10-20 frame maximum depending on what size my gifs are going to be. if you’ve taken more than that then just select the 15 or so frames with the most “content” in them. go file -> open, select your frames by holding down the tab key and then open them.

6) your frames should all open as different images, but we want them all to be stacked as different layers in one image. if you’re lucky you’ll be able to skip step 5 and 6 and just go to file -> scripts -> load files into stack, but this button doesn’t work for me so now i must do the tedious job of dragging all my frames onto one layer. if you need help doing this look over here! phew, 20 seconds later and i’m done. here’s what you should have:

7) now since i’m making a square gif to go in a gifset i’m going to go image -> image size -> height: 245 (your width will be 436) and hit okay. then i’m going to go image -> canvas size -> width: 245 to make a nice little square. now it’s time to sharpen your gif. so go filter -> sharpen -> smart sharpen -> these settings, after you do this once just press ctrl+f to repeat the action. go through the layers and sharpen each one.


8) make sure you have your animation window open (window -> check off animation) and click the drop down menu. hit “make frames from layers”, in some cases, your frames will be in the wrong order so you might need to press “reverse frames” too. select all your frames (hold down tab people!) and click the little down arrow by “0 sec”. this is the delay between frames. i always put mine at 0.13 so hit the “other” button and type in .13.


9) add a psd on and press the play button to see how it looks!


10) final step, go file -> save for web and devices and put your settings to something like this, if the gif is over 1M you can reduce the size by lowering the colors or reducing the number of frames.


and there we go! hope that helped and if you have any questions please message me! good luck ^.^



cr: watsonly.tumblr.com