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piplupcommanderThis was originally going to be on Tumblr, but Tumblr is oppressing me with image limits, so I GUESS IT GOES HERE. It's as much a tutorial as me compiling 16 years of tutorials, fucking around, and accidental discoveries into one place. If it helps other people, fantastic! If not, it's helping me.
TAKING SCREENCAPS
There are varying ways to take screencaps, these are the two I’ve used the most*. KMPlayer is a free program available here, while VideoPad is a video editing program with a full-featured free trial, but once the trial runs out you can no longer export anything. There are several payment options, I pay $16 every 3 months.
*I have also used VLC Player, but do not have it currently installed. It involves manually advancing and screenshotting frames, and while you can ease this process by setting hotkeys, it is still VERY tedious and I do not recommend.)
KMPlayer: Open your video file. Right-click on the window to bring up the menu. Navigate down to “Capture” and “Select Capture Folder”.
This is just to make sure you know where the caps are going and that you know where they are.
Now go to “Frame: Quick Extraction”.
You’ll get this window.
These are the settings I use, the ones circled in red are the most important. Click “start”, then “play” on your video, then “stop” when you’re at the end of the part you want to capture. This can be tricky for getting separate sets in one scene, and might require a lot of file cleanup after the fact.
(You can also do the VLC Player technique with this program, but it is still tedious and I still do not recommend.)
VideoPad: Open your video file as a new project. It’ll be in the preview panel, which is where we want it, and the timeline under the preview window will look like this.
Navigate to the start of the clip you want and click “split”.
Then navigate to the end of the clip you want and click it again. You can use the frame-by-frame buttons to get the precise moment.
Now you’ll have this in your bin. I used the very beginning of the movie so there's no "before" clip, but if you cut a scene out of the center of the file there will be your clip, a clip with everything before it, and a clip with everything after it. (Be smarter than me and rename your clips as you go or you'll end up with "[file name](1)(1)(1)(1)(1) unto infinity.)
Drag the snipped section onto your “Video 1” timeline at the bottom of the screen, or right-click “place clip on sequence”.
Top of the window, find the “export” panel.
Click “image sequence”.
You’ll get this window.
Pick a destination folder. You can futz with the other settings at your leisure, the most important thing is knowing where your files are going. If you’re doing a set and leave the folder as “Sequence 1”, it’ll automatically fill in “Sequence 2”, etc as you go on, which is handy.
Next step!
CREATING GIFS
File > Scripts > Load File Into Stack.
In the “Load Layers” menu, click the dropdown menu and switch “Files” to “Folder”.
Click “Browse”.
You’ll get this panel. Leave it sit for a second and open your capture folder, whichever program you used.
Click the address bar at the top of the window and copy what it gives you.
Paste it into this box.
It’ll do this. When they’re all loaded in, click “ok”.
It’ll load each file in as an individual layer; it can take a minute depending on how many layers you have. You’ll know for sure that it’s done when the last entry in the history panel is “Delete Layer”.
Crop your image. The button you want looks like this.
Look up near the top of the window for this box. This determines the width and height of your image after you crop it. For Tumblr, the height isn’t nearly so important as the width – here’s the guide I keep bookmarked. I’ve got mine set for a full-width “banner” size so let’s do that.
Set your crop window how you like and click the checkmark (or press enter).
If you don’t already have it set up, go to the “Window” menu and click “Timeline”.
That’ll give you this. (You can dock it anywhere; I like to have it at the bottom of the screen.) Click the “create frame animation” button.
Now you have the first frame of your gif.
Now I’m gonna show you a life saver. No matter what you do the process for turning your individual layers into frames of your animation is the same, so you can create an action to do it for you. Go to Window and click “Action”.
This (or something similar) will pop up.
Go to the bottom and click the folded-paper icon to create a new action.
In the box that pops up, name it and click “record”.
Everything you do now is being recorded for posterity, so ONLY do things you want repeated in the future. Start with this little hamburger menu in the top right corner of your timeline.
Hit “Make Frames From Layers”.
Now every layer is an individual frame of your gif.
But it’s backwards, so go to the hamburger menu again and hit “Reverse Frames”.
Same menu, “Select All Frames”.
With all the frames highlighted, click the bottom of any frame where it says “0 sec”. This is the delay of your frames – i.e. how long it takes to transfer from one frame to the next. 0 seems ideal but is actually uncomfortably fast, so we’re gonna change it.
When the menu pops up, click “Other”.
0.07 is pretty standard, but you can play with the numbers until it feels right. You’re usually going to want it to be under 0.1, however.
Next go to the bottom left where it says “Once”. This is how many times the gif will repeat itself.
Change it to “Forever”.
Remember your action recording? Go back to your Action window and click the “Stop Recording” button.
Now you have an Action where you can, in the future, just click it and it will do everything you just did automatically, in the order you did it.
Now we gotta go check something.
We’ll come back here later to save, but right now we need to check our file size. For Tumblr gifs have to be under3mb 10mb, it changed and nobody tells me nothin and this almost certainly won’t be as it is, but we can see how much work we need to do on it.
A lot, it turns out.
Close out of the Export window (“Cancel” or “Done” in the bottom right) and head back to your timeline panel. Play the gif through with the “play” and “frame by frame” buttons on the bottom of the panel until you find a stopping point you like.
In this case, we’re gonna take out the first part of the gif to buy us some wiggle room in the file size. Click the frame right before our stopping point…
Then scroll back to the beginning of the gif, hold down Shift, and click the first frame. This will select all the frames in between those two points.
Click the trash can at the bottom of the panel, and those frames will disappear.
Keep doing this and paring your gif down until it’s under 3mb. We wound up with just the bobber dropping into the water. (If you like to keep things neat, you can also delete the layers of the frames you deleted.)
Now, before we do anything else, make sure you have your first frame and your top layer selected. If you don’t have the first frame selected, none of the adjustments we’re about to make will show up except on the selected frame, and if you don’t have the top layer selected then the adjustment layers will be buried and won’t show up at all.
Having done that, click this little half-and-half at the bottom of the layers panel.
We want to bring out lights down and our darks up, so: Curves.
You’re gonna move this little guy around, and this is where it gets subjective. Literally just futz with the line until it looks good. I can’t tell you what looks good, that’s on you.
(Full disclosure, I intended to have gifs of the adjustments working in real time but my screen capture fucked up on me; these are not representative of the final product.)
We want to change our minimum and maximum light levels, so: Levels.
The different sliders change how dark the shadows can get, how bright the highlights can get, and where the middle ground is between the two.
We want to change what colors the different light levels give off, so: Color Balance.
Color balance changes the color tones of the shadows, highlights, and midtones. It’s how you enhance the colors you want and mitigate the ones you don’t.
Now we want to fuck with the very nature of color itself, so: Selective Color.
Selective color makes blacks darker, whites lighter, changes the brightness and color of all the midtones and affects how the colors themselves present. Mess with it enough and you can change the entire color make up of the image, it’s pretty cool.
There’s other stuff you can play with – Vibrance changes how vivid or saturated your colors are, Exposure gives you camera effects like over-exposed “film” or gamma correction, etc – but this is what we’re working with for right now.
I just learned how to do this myself, and only managed to make it work thanks to a screenshot of someone else's workspace that I saw completely at random. This is what I mean by aggregate knowledge. Anyway, this next part is as much for me as it is anyone else.
Now that we’ve done all of that, we’re gonna select all our layers except the adjustment layers by clicking the top one, holding shift, and clicking the bottom one, and then we’re either gonna press Ctrl+G or click the folder icon at the bottom of the layers panel.
Go back to the hamburger menu in the top right of the animation timeline and select “Convert to Video Timeline”.
Now it looks like this. (You might want to expand it upwards so you can see everything.)
Select your group of layers, right-click and select “Convert to Smart Object”.
Now it should look like this.
Right-click and duplicate that layer.
Go to the blending options at the top of the layers panel. We’re gonna set it to Screen, and it’s gonna make our image look like this.
We’re gonna mess with the opacity so it’s not quite so intense. 30% should do it.
With that same layer selected, go up to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.
Setting it to 40px creates a wide, fuzzy effect.
Setting to a single-digit number blurs just the edges of everything.
With that done, we’re going to create a new, blank layer with the “New Layer” button at the bottom of the layers panel.
We’re gonna take the fill tool and fill the new layer with white.
In the Blending options, we’re going to set this blank white layer to “Color”.
Depending on the vibe you’re going for, you could absolutely leave it like this. But we’re gonna scooch the opacity back to about 60% and get some saturation back.
Ta-da!
SUBTITLES
Now this on its own is a perfectly serviceable gif. But in the interest of completionism, we’re gonna add a subtitle. Grab your text tool, the stylized letter “T” in the toolbar.
Click and drag to stretch your text box across the gif, it’ll help with spacing it appropriately later.
Select your font. I like Myriad Pro, it should come pre-installed and has a lot of style choices. You usually want at least bold, it’s easier to read. (Calibri is also nice.)
Pick a size. Since this is a bigger gif, 24 should be good. Again, this is something you can play with and figure out what suits you.
And type your subtitle. This is terrible, it’s white-on-white and in a weird place and it sucks. We’re gonna fix it.
Pick your move tool. If you don’t already have them turned on, go to View > Show > Smart Guides and make sure it’s checked. It’s a secret tool that will help us later.
This tutorial is now a found-footage film as I take a picture of my screen to show what the Smart Guides are for. (Stupid failed screen record.) Bring the bottom of your text box as close to the bottom of your text as you can, hold down Ctrl and hover your Move tool over anything but the text box. It should show you how far away your box is from the edges of the canvas. For subtitles I like to place it five pixels above the bottom edge – press the arrow keys while holding Ctrl to nudge and check your distance at the same time.
Now we’re gonna fix the text. With the text layer selected, go to the bottom of the layer panel and select the “FX” menu and “Stroke”.
Stroke places a heavy outline around whatever it’s applied to. In this case, our subtitles.
This is a little chunkier than we want, so we’re gonna use the “Size” slider to dial it back a bit.
Now we’re gonna go down here on the side and select “Drop Shadow”.
My settings are still in place from another project, and almost all of them are wrong for this.
First we’re gonna change “Linear Dodge” to “Linear Burn”.
Next we’re gonna change the color to black. Click the box and either drag the little circle all the way to the bottom left corner or type six “0”s in the text box on the side.
Now we’re gonna play with these guys.
“Size” determines the “fluffiness” of the shadow. Set it high enough and it ascends into the stratosphere, never to be seen again.
“Spread” determines how firm the outline of the shadow is. It can either be a perfect recreation of the text’s outline or a little soft cloud version.
“Distance” is exactly what it sounds like, how far away from the text the shadow is.
Now I had those all set really dramatically to show off their functions, but we actually want them to be pretty subtle so let’s dial it ALL the way back down.
There, that’s more like it. Back in the Text menus, there’s a few different things you can do – if your text has different style choices like Bold Italic it can give emphasis or make the text more striking.
(If your font does not have these things, you can go to Window > Character and choose the “faux bold” or “faux italic” options.)
Or you can turn it colors! Yellow is pretty common for someone speaking off-screen, and some people color-codes subtitles to characters.
And now we save! Back into File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy).
All of our optimized options are under 3mb now, so we’re looking for the one with the least distortion in the image.
(Make sure to check down here for the “Loop Count” and make sure it’s set to “Forever”.)
These are the settings I pretty much always use, they don’t generally give me trouble and tbh I’ve never had any increase of quality in changing them.
Playing the gifs through a few times, it looks like bottom-left is our best bet. Click on it and make sure the box is outlined.
Hit “Save” in the bottom-right corner and make sure the format is set to “Images Only”.
Name and save and we’re done DON’T CLOSE THAT WINDOW
File > New. Doesn’t overly matter what size canvas. We are doing something kind for Future Us, especially if we plan to make several gifs of the same scene or series.
Grab the tab your new file is in and drag it out so that it makes its own little sub-window.
Click on the tab containing the gif to re-activate it, and select your subtitle layer.
Drag it onto your new canvas (it’s cut off because it’s longer than the new canvas, all the pieces are still there).
Back in the gif document, group your adjustment layers the way you did earlier and drag that group over to the new file.
File > Save As. You want to save as a PHOTOSHOP DOCUMENT. A .PSD. If you save in a regular image format your layers will be locked, rendering it useless for future use.
Now we have a completed gif AND all our hard-earned adjustment layers (and our subtitle preferences) saved for easy access to click-and-drag onto another gif.
If you read all of this I sincerely hope it helped and that you’re able to make lots of fancy pretty gifsets!!
TAKING SCREENCAPS
There are varying ways to take screencaps, these are the two I’ve used the most*. KMPlayer is a free program available here, while VideoPad is a video editing program with a full-featured free trial, but once the trial runs out you can no longer export anything. There are several payment options, I pay $16 every 3 months.
*I have also used VLC Player, but do not have it currently installed. It involves manually advancing and screenshotting frames, and while you can ease this process by setting hotkeys, it is still VERY tedious and I do not recommend.)
KMPlayer: Open your video file. Right-click on the window to bring up the menu. Navigate down to “Capture” and “Select Capture Folder”.
This is just to make sure you know where the caps are going and that you know where they are.
Now go to “Frame: Quick Extraction”.
You’ll get this window.
These are the settings I use, the ones circled in red are the most important. Click “start”, then “play” on your video, then “stop” when you’re at the end of the part you want to capture. This can be tricky for getting separate sets in one scene, and might require a lot of file cleanup after the fact.
(You can also do the VLC Player technique with this program, but it is still tedious and I still do not recommend.)
VideoPad: Open your video file as a new project. It’ll be in the preview panel, which is where we want it, and the timeline under the preview window will look like this.
Navigate to the start of the clip you want and click “split”.
Then navigate to the end of the clip you want and click it again. You can use the frame-by-frame buttons to get the precise moment.
Now you’ll have this in your bin. I used the very beginning of the movie so there's no "before" clip, but if you cut a scene out of the center of the file there will be your clip, a clip with everything before it, and a clip with everything after it. (Be smarter than me and rename your clips as you go or you'll end up with "[file name](1)(1)(1)(1)(1) unto infinity.)
Drag the snipped section onto your “Video 1” timeline at the bottom of the screen, or right-click “place clip on sequence”.
Top of the window, find the “export” panel.
Click “image sequence”.
You’ll get this window.
Pick a destination folder. You can futz with the other settings at your leisure, the most important thing is knowing where your files are going. If you’re doing a set and leave the folder as “Sequence 1”, it’ll automatically fill in “Sequence 2”, etc as you go on, which is handy.
Next step!
CREATING GIFS
File > Scripts > Load File Into Stack.
In the “Load Layers” menu, click the dropdown menu and switch “Files” to “Folder”.
Click “Browse”.
You’ll get this panel. Leave it sit for a second and open your capture folder, whichever program you used.
Click the address bar at the top of the window and copy what it gives you.
Paste it into this box.
It’ll do this. When they’re all loaded in, click “ok”.
It’ll load each file in as an individual layer; it can take a minute depending on how many layers you have. You’ll know for sure that it’s done when the last entry in the history panel is “Delete Layer”.
Crop your image. The button you want looks like this.
Look up near the top of the window for this box. This determines the width and height of your image after you crop it. For Tumblr, the height isn’t nearly so important as the width – here’s the guide I keep bookmarked. I’ve got mine set for a full-width “banner” size so let’s do that.
Set your crop window how you like and click the checkmark (or press enter).
If you don’t already have it set up, go to the “Window” menu and click “Timeline”.
That’ll give you this. (You can dock it anywhere; I like to have it at the bottom of the screen.) Click the “create frame animation” button.
Now you have the first frame of your gif.
Now I’m gonna show you a life saver. No matter what you do the process for turning your individual layers into frames of your animation is the same, so you can create an action to do it for you. Go to Window and click “Action”.
This (or something similar) will pop up.
Go to the bottom and click the folded-paper icon to create a new action.
In the box that pops up, name it and click “record”.
Everything you do now is being recorded for posterity, so ONLY do things you want repeated in the future. Start with this little hamburger menu in the top right corner of your timeline.
Hit “Make Frames From Layers”.
Now every layer is an individual frame of your gif.
But it’s backwards, so go to the hamburger menu again and hit “Reverse Frames”.
Same menu, “Select All Frames”.
With all the frames highlighted, click the bottom of any frame where it says “0 sec”. This is the delay of your frames – i.e. how long it takes to transfer from one frame to the next. 0 seems ideal but is actually uncomfortably fast, so we’re gonna change it.
When the menu pops up, click “Other”.
0.07 is pretty standard, but you can play with the numbers until it feels right. You’re usually going to want it to be under 0.1, however.
Next go to the bottom left where it says “Once”. This is how many times the gif will repeat itself.
Change it to “Forever”.
Remember your action recording? Go back to your Action window and click the “Stop Recording” button.
Now you have an Action where you can, in the future, just click it and it will do everything you just did automatically, in the order you did it.
Now we gotta go check something.
We’ll come back here later to save, but right now we need to check our file size. For Tumblr gifs have to be under
A lot, it turns out.
Close out of the Export window (“Cancel” or “Done” in the bottom right) and head back to your timeline panel. Play the gif through with the “play” and “frame by frame” buttons on the bottom of the panel until you find a stopping point you like.
In this case, we’re gonna take out the first part of the gif to buy us some wiggle room in the file size. Click the frame right before our stopping point…
Then scroll back to the beginning of the gif, hold down Shift, and click the first frame. This will select all the frames in between those two points.
Click the trash can at the bottom of the panel, and those frames will disappear.
Keep doing this and paring your gif down until it’s under 3mb. We wound up with just the bobber dropping into the water. (If you like to keep things neat, you can also delete the layers of the frames you deleted.)
Now, before we do anything else, make sure you have your first frame and your top layer selected. If you don’t have the first frame selected, none of the adjustments we’re about to make will show up except on the selected frame, and if you don’t have the top layer selected then the adjustment layers will be buried and won’t show up at all.
Having done that, click this little half-and-half at the bottom of the layers panel.
We want to bring out lights down and our darks up, so: Curves.
You’re gonna move this little guy around, and this is where it gets subjective. Literally just futz with the line until it looks good. I can’t tell you what looks good, that’s on you.
(Full disclosure, I intended to have gifs of the adjustments working in real time but my screen capture fucked up on me; these are not representative of the final product.)
We want to change our minimum and maximum light levels, so: Levels.
The different sliders change how dark the shadows can get, how bright the highlights can get, and where the middle ground is between the two.
We want to change what colors the different light levels give off, so: Color Balance.
Color balance changes the color tones of the shadows, highlights, and midtones. It’s how you enhance the colors you want and mitigate the ones you don’t.
Now we want to fuck with the very nature of color itself, so: Selective Color.
Selective color makes blacks darker, whites lighter, changes the brightness and color of all the midtones and affects how the colors themselves present. Mess with it enough and you can change the entire color make up of the image, it’s pretty cool.
There’s other stuff you can play with – Vibrance changes how vivid or saturated your colors are, Exposure gives you camera effects like over-exposed “film” or gamma correction, etc – but this is what we’re working with for right now.
I just learned how to do this myself, and only managed to make it work thanks to a screenshot of someone else's workspace that I saw completely at random. This is what I mean by aggregate knowledge. Anyway, this next part is as much for me as it is anyone else.
Now that we’ve done all of that, we’re gonna select all our layers except the adjustment layers by clicking the top one, holding shift, and clicking the bottom one, and then we’re either gonna press Ctrl+G or click the folder icon at the bottom of the layers panel.
Go back to the hamburger menu in the top right of the animation timeline and select “Convert to Video Timeline”.
Now it looks like this. (You might want to expand it upwards so you can see everything.)
Select your group of layers, right-click and select “Convert to Smart Object”.
Now it should look like this.
Right-click and duplicate that layer.
Go to the blending options at the top of the layers panel. We’re gonna set it to Screen, and it’s gonna make our image look like this.
We’re gonna mess with the opacity so it’s not quite so intense. 30% should do it.
With that same layer selected, go up to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.
Setting it to 40px creates a wide, fuzzy effect.
Setting to a single-digit number blurs just the edges of everything.
With that done, we’re going to create a new, blank layer with the “New Layer” button at the bottom of the layers panel.
We’re gonna take the fill tool and fill the new layer with white.
In the Blending options, we’re going to set this blank white layer to “Color”.
Depending on the vibe you’re going for, you could absolutely leave it like this. But we’re gonna scooch the opacity back to about 60% and get some saturation back.
Ta-da!
SUBTITLES
Now this on its own is a perfectly serviceable gif. But in the interest of completionism, we’re gonna add a subtitle. Grab your text tool, the stylized letter “T” in the toolbar.
Click and drag to stretch your text box across the gif, it’ll help with spacing it appropriately later.
Select your font. I like Myriad Pro, it should come pre-installed and has a lot of style choices. You usually want at least bold, it’s easier to read. (Calibri is also nice.)
Pick a size. Since this is a bigger gif, 24 should be good. Again, this is something you can play with and figure out what suits you.
And type your subtitle. This is terrible, it’s white-on-white and in a weird place and it sucks. We’re gonna fix it.
Pick your move tool. If you don’t already have them turned on, go to View > Show > Smart Guides and make sure it’s checked. It’s a secret tool that will help us later.
This tutorial is now a found-footage film as I take a picture of my screen to show what the Smart Guides are for. (Stupid failed screen record.) Bring the bottom of your text box as close to the bottom of your text as you can, hold down Ctrl and hover your Move tool over anything but the text box. It should show you how far away your box is from the edges of the canvas. For subtitles I like to place it five pixels above the bottom edge – press the arrow keys while holding Ctrl to nudge and check your distance at the same time.
Now we’re gonna fix the text. With the text layer selected, go to the bottom of the layer panel and select the “FX” menu and “Stroke”.
Stroke places a heavy outline around whatever it’s applied to. In this case, our subtitles.
This is a little chunkier than we want, so we’re gonna use the “Size” slider to dial it back a bit.
Now we’re gonna go down here on the side and select “Drop Shadow”.
My settings are still in place from another project, and almost all of them are wrong for this.
First we’re gonna change “Linear Dodge” to “Linear Burn”.
Next we’re gonna change the color to black. Click the box and either drag the little circle all the way to the bottom left corner or type six “0”s in the text box on the side.
Now we’re gonna play with these guys.
“Size” determines the “fluffiness” of the shadow. Set it high enough and it ascends into the stratosphere, never to be seen again.
“Spread” determines how firm the outline of the shadow is. It can either be a perfect recreation of the text’s outline or a little soft cloud version.
“Distance” is exactly what it sounds like, how far away from the text the shadow is.
Now I had those all set really dramatically to show off their functions, but we actually want them to be pretty subtle so let’s dial it ALL the way back down.
There, that’s more like it. Back in the Text menus, there’s a few different things you can do – if your text has different style choices like Bold Italic it can give emphasis or make the text more striking.
(If your font does not have these things, you can go to Window > Character and choose the “faux bold” or “faux italic” options.)
Or you can turn it colors! Yellow is pretty common for someone speaking off-screen, and some people color-codes subtitles to characters.
And now we save! Back into File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy).
All of our optimized options are under 3mb now, so we’re looking for the one with the least distortion in the image.
(Make sure to check down here for the “Loop Count” and make sure it’s set to “Forever”.)
These are the settings I pretty much always use, they don’t generally give me trouble and tbh I’ve never had any increase of quality in changing them.
Playing the gifs through a few times, it looks like bottom-left is our best bet. Click on it and make sure the box is outlined.
Hit “Save” in the bottom-right corner and make sure the format is set to “Images Only”.
Name and save and we’re done DON’T CLOSE THAT WINDOW
File > New. Doesn’t overly matter what size canvas. We are doing something kind for Future Us, especially if we plan to make several gifs of the same scene or series.
Grab the tab your new file is in and drag it out so that it makes its own little sub-window.
Click on the tab containing the gif to re-activate it, and select your subtitle layer.
Drag it onto your new canvas (it’s cut off because it’s longer than the new canvas, all the pieces are still there).
Back in the gif document, group your adjustment layers the way you did earlier and drag that group over to the new file.
File > Save As. You want to save as a PHOTOSHOP DOCUMENT. A .PSD. If you save in a regular image format your layers will be locked, rendering it useless for future use.
Now we have a completed gif AND all our hard-earned adjustment layers (and our subtitle preferences) saved for easy access to click-and-drag onto another gif.
If you read all of this I sincerely hope it helped and that you’re able to make lots of fancy pretty gifsets!!
