I didn’t go into a lot of detail with this earlier so I just wanted to show how awesome this lovely adjustment layer can really be.

Read more

Here we are then, as promised, the ‘optimization tutorial’ or ‘tricks to get the bloody thing under 500kb’.

1. ‘Save for Web and Devices’ option in the File Menu.

See this Optimized tab? Don’t even bother looking at the other tabs. It’s Optimized or gtfo. This is what your gif will look like once it’s saved for the web.

I’ve already shown you how to reduce the size of the gif by changing the amount of colours on your gif. You also have the option of manually removing only the colours you choose.

Just select the colour you want to remove and hit the little garbage can icon on the bottom. This works well for removing similar colours that you don’t really need. For example, with these settings my gif is now 317kb. If I remove 7 of the similar greens, I can reduce the size to 309kb and the gif colour doesn’t change much.

It might not seem like that much, but sometimes you just need that little tweak to sneak your graphic under the 500kb limit.

The next thing you can do is play around with Dithering. Dithering is basically the process of juxtaposing pixels of two colors to create the illusion that a third color is present. It lets Photoshop simulate colours our monitors can’t display. There are three dithering options: Diffusion, Pattern and Noise.

Diffusion: Applies a random pattern that is diffused across adjacent pixels. But too little diffusion can cause harsh banding of colours.

Pattern: Applies a halftone-like square pattern to simulate any colors not in the color table.
Noise: Applies a random pattern similar to the Diffusion dither method, but without diffusing the pattern across adjacent pixels. So this can look pixelly but you won’t get any banding.

With Diffusion you also have a further Dither option as well as the Lossy option.

Dither: Lets you control the amount of colours simulated by the Diffusion option. The lower the numbers the less colours and more banding you get.

Lossy: This lets you remove information from your graphic, which, while reducing file size, reduces the amount of detail you have. However, you can get some pretty neat effects with it.

I typically avoid Diffusion when I use lots of gradients, because I always end up with ugly banding, but each gif is different. I generally use Pattern the most, but play around with these options to see what suits your style the best.

2. Greyscale

A very easy way to reduce the size of your gif is to make it greyscale. You can do this in a few ways. The first is Image > Mode > Greyscale. Make sure you choose the option ‘DON’T MERGE’.

There is the Channel Mixer adjustment layer option, select ‘Monochrome’ in the Adjustment Layer menu.

And last but not least, the basic greyscale Gradient Map option. Just choose the black & white option and leave the layer on Normal.

3. Posterize Adjustment Layer

When you posterize your graphic you’re basically limiting the amount of colours used, like a printed poster. The lovely thing about this is that since it’s an adjustment layer you can add a mask so you only affect the parts of the gif you don’t need a lot of detail on.

If you look at the building behind Rose you can really see where the difference is. This was without any dithering, so once you add that it’s a lot smoother, and it can make a huge difference in your output. I almost always use a posterize layer at some part of my gifs.

That’s it for now! Part 2 will have all the tricks I know for further reducing the size of your gif, including static backgrounds, gradients and further adjustment layers.

I notice quite a few people are struggling with making gifs recently, so I’m going to make a few tutorials with some basic gif techniques that might help you on your way :D I make my gifs with Photoshop CS5 and VLC Player, so that’s what I’m using for this. I believe you can pretty much do the same thing with CS3/4 so it shouldn’t be too tough to translate over.

1. If you don’t already have it, download VLC here.

2. Set up a screencap folder

Install and open VLC. On the top menu go to Tools > Preferences > Video.

a) Click ‘browse’ to choose which directory you want your caps to save to. I have a folder on my desktop called ‘VLC Caps’ so I can access it easily.

b) Then choose which prefix you want for your pictures. I left it as default.

c) Now choose whether you want to save your screencaps as pngs or jpgs. I chose png format cuz I heard it was better quality than jpg, but you can choose whatever you want.

3. Set up screencap hotkey

Now click on Hotkeys in the left menu.

a) Find where it says ‘Take video snapshot’ then click to the right of that under the column ‘Hotkey’.

b) You will see either a preset hotkey or a blank field. Set your hotkey (I chose shift + s).

c) Click ‘Apply’. Hit ‘Save’ on the bottom right and we’re done setting up VLC!

4. Find your clip and take screenshots

Open the video you want to take caps from.

I chose the first episode of New Who called Rose. The scene I want to make a gif of it at about 17:15, so I skip to there.

a) Pause your video a little before the scene you want to take caps. Spacebar is the hotkey for pause, take advantage of that.

b) This little arrow is used to slow down your video and you can use it to take more control over the exact caps you want. Click this button 3 times to slow your video down to 0.33x.

Unpause your video and we can start capping. Begin tapping your hotkey a few frames before the ones you want just in case VLC lags when it begins. Continue tapping your hotkey until you’ve got the exact caps you want.

c) When you’re done and want to speed up your video again, click this button 3 times to reset the speed back to 1.00x.

5. Opening your caps with Photoshop

a) Go to File > Scripts > Load Files Into Stack

b) Choose browse then locate your VLC cap folder.

Select the files you want to use and then click ‘Ok’.

It may take a moment for the files to load, and when they’re done hit ‘Ok’.

6. Create an animation file from your caps

In this cap a) is your animation bar and b) is your layers. No matter what you do in the animation bar your layers will ALWAYS still be there, so if you make a mistake and delete a frame, DON’T PANIC. You can always set up the frame again when you find the correct layer.

If you’re not seeing the animation bar, you can open it by clicking Window > Animation.

Ok so now we need to create frames for this animation and put a picture on each frame. To do this, click little box I’ve highlighted and this menu will pop up.

Click Make Frames From Layers and each layer will automatically be assigned it’s own frame in the animation bar, like so.

For whatever reason the caps usually show up in the animation bar in opposite order, so you may need to fix that. If so, open up the menu again and click Reverse Frames.

7. Optimizing your gif for Tumblr

The gif constraints on Tumblr are 500x600 pixels and 500kb. I generally make my gifs 500 pixels wide and I want Rose to be quite visible, so I change the canvas size to 500x250 pixels. I know which frames I want, so I deleted my extra layers on the left to reduce lag on my shitty computer.

Let’s take a closer look at the animation bar.

a) Animation loop. Lets you choose whether you want the animation to repeat forever or stop after so many cycles.

b) First frame. Moves you to your first frame in the animation.

c) Frame backward.

d) Play animation.

e) Frame forward.

f) Tween. Allows you to merge two scenes together. I will go over this later.

g) Duplicate frame. This will duplicate whichever frames you have selected.

h) Deletes frame. You can delete more than one at a time by shift+clicking or ctrl+clicking multiple frames.

i) Animation speed adjustment. You can make your animation slower or faster using this option.

So what you want to do now is go through your animation and find the frames that you don’t want and delete them. You’ll notice that as you scroll through your animation the layer visibility on the right jumps from frame to frame.

You may notice that your animation times on the bottom say 0.00 and mine says 0.18. This means that I’ve changed the time between layers to be just a bit shorter than 1 second. If your animation is running too fast, select all your layers and click on the numbers underneath any of the frames, like so:

I generally use caps that are close in sequence to eachother, so I go with 0.14-0.18 most of the time. It may seem a tad slow, but when you upload them they go a lot faster than you see on your computer.

If you’re happy with the flow and speed of your gif, it’s time to save. First, if you want a pdf copy of your file, save it the regular way from the menu. Then to save it for the internet, we go to File > Save for Web & Devices.

Then the screen that comes up is where we sweat over how to reduce our gif to the 500kb file constraints :D

My gif is 522.5kb, so I need to reduce it somehow. The easiest way is to reduce the amount of colours from 256 to 128, which puts it at 399.5kb.

Once it’s under the limit, you click ‘Save’, save it as a gif file, and you’re done!

In the next post I’ll teach you how to add adjustment layers, other ways of optimizing your graphic, and how to make sure your text stays where it’s supposed to :D

If you have any questions or would like me to clarify something, hit up my ask box and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!