GIF RELATED QUESTIONS

I’ve been deleting all these asks and feel a little bad, so I’m just going to do a brief overview right now and link it at the top of my tumblr.

WHAT FONT DO YOU USE?

For all of my panel gifs, I use “Cooper Std.”

This is “Helvetica CE 35 Thin.”

This is “Helvetica Neue.”

SCREENCAP PROGRAM

I used to just use “VLC + spacebar + ctrl/shift/3” for all of my gifs, but Avidemux is a really great (free!) program.  It lets you select a start and end range, then extracts all the frames.

GIF PROGRAM

I use Adobe Photoshop CS5.

VERY VERY QUICK HOW-TO

  1. Copy-paste all the frames you want to use into different layers.
  2. Adjust as you see fit.
  3. On the top bar, click Window -> Animation to pull up the Animation window.
  4. Make sure you’re using the left tab for frames.
  5. Click the right drop-down menu -> “Make frames from layers”
  6. Adjust as you see fit.

HOW DO YOU GET THE BLACK SHADOW TYPE THING LIKE THIS:

You can create this effect by using the layer mask in Photoshop CS5.

  1. When you’ve copy-pasted your screencaps into layers, select the ones you want to group together (all of them if this is just a simple one-motion gif).
  2. Click the drop-down at the top right of the “layers” window and select “New group from layers…”
  3. Call it whatever you like and hit ok.
  4. Then select the group and open up the “masks” window.
  5. At the top right, you’ll see two icons, the one to the left should be “Add a pixel mask.”  Click this.
  6. If you go to your layers window, there should be a rectangle (the layer mask) next to your group like this:
  8. When the mask is selected, you can paint on it.  BLACK HIDES, WHITE REVEALS.  You can also use the gradient tool to create fades.
  9. Have fun.

HOW DO YOU HAVE TWO IMAGES MOVING AT ONCE IN ONE GIF?

  1. If you understand how to make a gif (see above or search “gif tutorial”), this should be pretty straight-forward.
  2. In Photoshop, you can control which layers are visible in each frame.  You basically need to just play with this concept.  Instead of having one layer visible per frame, you’re going to have 2.