(Starts dramatically singing like High School Musical) Everybody gather ‘round!
This has been asked so many times, I might as well make a tutorial!! For starters I use Photoshop CC, I used to have Photoshop CS6, but due to an issue, it got upgraded. But to be honest it is so much like Photoshop CS6 so no worries.
This is how the gif will end up looking:
This is gonna be a long tutorial so bear with me here!
1: Open up your Photoshop, and I am working off of what I have I am sorry if you have a different Photoshop and some steps might now be on there. But go to file < Import < Video frames to layers… Like shown below
2: Select your clip of your desire and then a window should pop up like this
(I click the selected range only and limit to every two frames)
Click the little grey little diamond shaped thing and move it to the place where your clip you want to gif is, and use the black markers to enclose the clip like this:
3: Next step, after you got the clip you want in the middle of the black little pieces, press okay.
4: Once you have your clip opened and loaded, go to Window < Timeline
Now by this point you should have your frames on the little timeline at the bottom. Onward to the next part!
5: Your clip is too long by this point, I shorten my clip to 9 frames, so to get to that I won’t take a screenshot of it, but I think I am good at explaining so here I go. Take the first clip on the actual timeline and get to the beginning of the clip which you wanna gif by holding shift and clicking the frame before your desired clip. And do the same for the access clips you don’t want.
6: After you have done that your timeline should look like this
Now that you have gotten to this point, click play, the clip is going too fast right? Click the little arrow that is next to the “0.04” or whatever number you might have and I put it on 0.2 but you can put whatever speed you want. It is much easier to highlight all the clips in your timeline all at once by holding the shift key and clicking the first clip and click the last clip and then slow down the speed.
7: Is your gif too big? Go to Image at the top and resize it to 900KB (The top is the only one I change) So it looks like this now
8: Okay now here comes the fun part! Yay sharpening!!! :) Go to your first frame on your clip and go up to Filter < Sharpen < Sharpen
**MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE FRAME SELECTED IN THE BAR ON THE RIGHT TOO LIKE AS SHOWN BELOW**
Okay there is no shortcut to sharpening the frames all at once so sharpen each frame at a time and don’t forget the right bar it is pretty important! *Hint to keep yourself from going up to filter and sharpen every single time you go to a different frame click ctrl + f at the same time while going to each frame*
9: Now your sharpening is finished on your gif it looks a lot better right? I love sharpen it brings out the features in the clip you are creating. Next step brightening up your gif and coloring it this is the next fun part!! Examples are below with an idea of what you can do with your gif to color it :) You can use curves, levels, selective colors, etc.
And etc and etc…
10: Now to resize it to a smaller size. Follow step 7 and I usually make the gif down to 500KB (well pixels usually so it will look like the picture above but with 500 and a lower height.
11: Then you are practically finished, just add whatever effects you want to your gif, textures or anything else you would like on your gif. Crop it or whatever else you wanna do (I am not getting into explanation how to crop on Photoshop)
12: It is time to save your gif!!! :) Go to File < Save for Web
13: Shown below is how I have my settings, nothing special really just the default settings. when you’re finished press save and name your gif and there you go you’re finished!!! :)
This has been a tutorial by none other than disneyineveryway! I hope that this helped! :)