My gifs tutorial 

I’ve been asked to explain how to make gifs a several times, so I decided to make a tutorial and explain thoroughly, step by step.

You need Photoshop CS3 or newer and KMPlayer(or any other program that captures screenshots of a video. I use KMPlayed so I’ll explain how to use it).

You need your video saved on your pc. If it’s a youtube video, you can use KeepVid to download it.

Open the video on KMPlayer, right click there > Capture > Frame:Extract (If it’s a long video like a full movie or an episode and you only want a specific part of it, put the video a bit before that part starts)

A new window will open, these are basically the settings of how it will capture the frames. That’s how I use it, but you can choose different settings, it’s up to you:) Make sure your video is playing, because otherwise, it won’t do anything and then hit the start button. It will start capturing. If you want a specific part of the video, you can stop the video when the part is over and it will stop capturing.

When you’re finished with that, open Photoshop. You’ll need to open the animation window, if it isn’t open.

Then, go to File > Scripts > Load Files Into Stack…

In that window, press browse and pick the frames you want. Photoshop will take some secs to load the layers. Once it’s finished loading them, open the menu on the animation window > Make Frames From Layers.

*Make sure you don’t have too many frames because tumblr doesn’t permit gifs that weight more than 500kb. On the other hand, don’t make it too short because it might seem weird. 20 Frames more or less should be good.

You’ll see your frames are from the end to the beginning. What you need to do is open the same menu and choose “Reverse Frames”.

Now you need to set the frames’ delay. In order to do that, you need to go to the same menu and choose “Select All Frames”. Then right click below the frames, where it says 0 sec. I usually set it to 0.13, but it’s up to you, try to see how you like it the most.

Then, just resize/crop your gif to the size you want it to be.

If you want, you can edit it now too. Once you’re done, go to File > Save For Web&Devices…

Now, if your gif size is less than 500kb, save it and that’s it. If it’s more than 500kb, like mine, you’ll have to lower the amount of colors and kind of “play” with the settings there until the size is under 500kb and the quality isn’t too bad. If you try everything and it’s still too heavy, your options are:

1) resize/crop your gif.

2) change your gif to black and white.

3) try to remove unnecessary frames.

And that’s it! Here’s my result :)