There's a pop tart in the CD drawer.


Awwww shit, it’s a skinsgenone gif tutorial! 

So it would appear that thrillerxo has deleted her tumblr, which is horrible because she posted wonderful graphics and gifs and loves Fernando Torres.

Since she is now gone, it means her CS5 gif tutorial is gone, too, so I can no longer just redirect people to it.

WHICH IS WHY I AM NOW GOING TO ATTEMPT TO MAKE MY OWN!

Now, this is how I make my gifs, so this isn’t necessarily how you have to do it. There are plenty of different ways to achieve a moving picture like in Harry Potter, but this is just how I know. So here we go.

STEP ONE:
In order to make your gifs, you’re going to need some frames to work with! If you don’t already have it, download VLC Media Player. Once you’ve got that, either open a file or insert a DVD and open it in VLC. It should look something like this:

Now make it full screen and choose which scene in the video you would like to gif. Got it? Good. Once you’ve gotten to the exact spot you want to gif, hit pause. Then, take a screenshot of it. On VLC you can do this by hitting alt-command-S (Mac) or alt-control-S (PC). The screenshot should save to your pictures. On a Mac, you can also take a screenshot by hitting command-shift-3, and it will save automatically to your desktop (that’s what I do) and on PCs you can hit fn-print screen, but that you will need to paste and save in Paint.

So now that you’ve got your first screenshot, you need to make a few more! In order to move to the next frame on VLC, hit the E button. When I make my gifs, I like to use every 3 to 5 frames, depending on how long I want it to be. So to use every 3 frames, just hit the E key 3 times before taking your next screenshot.

For my gifs, I like to use about 8 frames, but you can use up to about 10 before it gets way too large. So decide how many frames you’d like to use, and make that many screenshots.

STEP TWO:
Now that you’ve got all your frames all set and ready to go, open photoshop! I use CS5 Extended, but these steps should work for most versions.

First you need to make sure you’re in “Motion.” If you are it will look like this, with the toolbar on the bottom and whatnot:

If you’re just opening photoshop for the first time, chances are you are in “Essentials” and not “Motion,” which will look like this:

In order to get to “Motion,” go to the very top of the screen, to the right. Where it says “Essentials,” “Design” and “Painting,” click the arrows next to “Painting,” and scroll down to where it says “Motion.” Click that. Now you’re business!

In Photoshop, click “File” at the top, go to down to “Scripts,” and then click “Load files into stack.” Like this:

Once you’ve clicked “Load files into Stack,” it should look something like this:

Click “Browse” and then select your frames for the gif. Once you’ve opened them, hit “OK.”

Once all your files have loaded, it should look like this:

On the bottom of the screen, there is the animation toolbar, which is that rectangle on the bottom with what is currently a single frame on it. On the top-right corner of the toolbar is a little button with an upside-down triangle and some lines. Click that button.

Once you’ve clicked that, click “Make frames from layers,” like so:

Once you’ve clicked that, each individual screenshot will be made into a frame and it will look like this:

Now go back to the same little button that allowed you to make the frames, and click on “Reverse frames,” because for whatever reason they always come out backwards.

Now you need to time the frames. Select all the frames at once and then, while still having all the frames selected, click on one of the upside-down triangles on one of the frames. It does not matter which one you click, as long as you click one, like so:

I like to set my frames at 0.2 seconds, but you can choose whichever time you’d like.

Now hit the “play” button at the bottom (the sideways triangle) and watch your gif move!

STEP THREE:
Now that you’ve got yourself a proper moving gif, you need to make it pretty! Start by cropping out those ugly black lines. To do this, you can use the crop tool on the left sidebar, the one that’s fifth from the top and kind of looks like a box. Select what you’d like to crop out, like this:

And then right click and choose “Crop,” obviously.

Now, I’m not going to tell you how to make your gif pretty. It’s yours! Color it however the fuck you want! Go fool around with that now.

STEP FOUR:

Now that you’ve got your gif all ~nice and pretty~, it’s time to save it! Go to “File” and click “Save for Web & Devices,” like this:

DO NOT CLICK “SAVE AS!” I REPEAT: DO NOT CLICK SAVE AS!!!!

Once you’ve clicked Save for Web & Devices, it will look something like this:

Tumblr has a silly rule that all gifs must be less than or equal to 500px in width, so first thing you need to do is resize this baby. Where it says “Image Size” next to the “W” replace whatever number is there with 500. Now it should look like this:

Tumblr also has a silly rule that all gifs must be less than or equal to 500K (but in my experience it’s really 499K), so if your gif falls above that number, you need to fiddle around to make it smaller. You can do this in all different ways, like by lowering the colors to 128. Once you can get it under 500K, then you’ve got yourself a working, moving gif! Hurrah!

Here’s mine:

I really hope this made sense and I didn’t skip any steps! Hope you all have fun making gifs!


  1. skywxlker reblogged this from brittapperry
  2. brittapperry reblogged this from skinsgenone
  3. skinsgenone posted this