hey you guys welcome back to our channel the number one place for designers artists and
creators my name is laszlo i'm a graphic designer illustrator here at dantier and balogh and today
i want to show you a little known way of how to make your own gifs using nothing but photoshop
the beauty of making gifs or jifs in photoshop is that you don't need very serious animation skills
whatsoever photoshop offers you a very simple and quick option to make your graphics move
if you just want to do something simple like you know this kind of stuff
i want to show you this basic process because i think this is the perfect
first step into the world of motion graphics to be good at animating you're going to have to develop
a sense and understanding of motion and for that i believe this is the perfect
beginner level exercise so without further ado let me show you how to do this
first of all let's make a new document something not too big so our file size will stay small
let's say 500 by 500 pixels square at 72 point per inch now bring in your graphic that you want
to animate i'm going to use our logo for our example here which is a png with no background
i would recommend a piece of graphics similar to this one as in just a shape with only a handful
of colors and a transparent background now the animation i want to make is the logo floating
into the middle getting bigger and bigger as if it gets closer to the viewer so what i need
to do is copy my logos layer a couple of times and then resize the logo in these new layers
so we go and duplicate the layer then i select my logo here on the new layer and with the
transform controls i grab one corner and bring it in slightly so it becomes smaller now repeat this
a couple of times i reckon five or six layers are enough to make naturally flowing animation here
now eventually we will turn these layers onto our frames so it helps if you keep
them in the right corner it will also help if you give the layers proper names
the way i did mine is i kept the final frame so the logo as it is now at the bottom layer
and then the logos on these other layers on top are gradually getting smaller and smaller
but you can organize them the other way around as well as long as they stay in chronological order
once i got this sorted i select them all and i align them to the center with
these buttons on the top just hit a line vertically and then horizontally as well
okay all set now the key that will unlock the ability to animate in photoshop is that timeline
you don't see this by default so you have to go to window and then tick timeline now we go
to our timeline window and click on create frame animation this will create a timeline of frames
that we can play with now on the right here click and look for the make frames from layers option
this will automatically make our first rough animation for us and if you click the play
button you can actually see what it looks like at the moment now for me it flows the other
way around i would want to make the logo grow big instead of shrinking so i go back to these
options here on the right and i click on reverse frames that's better now under all frames there is
a little timer that shows you how long the frame is going to be visible in the animation sequence
for the most part i do want to leave them at zero seconds so they just move seamlessly
frame by frame but then once the animation is complete i want it to stop for a bit
so people can actually see the logo so for the final frame i put one second oh yeah since my logo
is white i brought in a gray background just so i can see what i'm doing here and when i clicked on
the create frames from layers obviously photoshop has made a frame of the background layer as well
so if you did the same thing just select this frame and click on this little bin icon
on the bottom to delete it from the timeline now if your graphic is a solid color picture your work
probably looks quite nice already but since i went with the white logo i'm going to turn on
my background just to see what the animation will look like on the top of other content
i have to do this by turning the background layer on manually on all the frames one by one
now one other thing that would help my transition is to play with the opacity settings a little
so leave the final logo layer at 100 percent but turn the other layers down a little
here you can see i am turning down the one above the final one
by about 20 percent then the next one about 40 percent and so on and so on
now let's do a chest run see i made a little mistake here so i thought i would leave this in to
explain how to correct this because you might do the same thing at some point during this process
what is happening is my top layer is now visible in all frames so if
that happens all you have to do is go through your frames
by clicking them on one by one and then turn off this layer's visibility on them on the timeline
except for the one frame that is supposed to be showing this layer of
course
okay that's better now let's save our work first i just save the psd file so we got that covered
then what we have to do is actually export our gif
oh yeah first i need to turn my background layer off so i only make a gif of my logo
now you go file export and save for web
now here there are a bunch of settings you might want to experiment with
of course the most important one is making sure that our final five format is set to give
here on the side you can see all the colors of the gif you can modify these as well if you need to
for example if your gif is more complicated and you might want to dumb it down a little
it might work to try to decrease the column numbers just so the file will become smaller
here you can also set up if you want the gift to loop continuously or if you would
only want it to play once then click on save give it a name and there you go it's done
now i quickly went back and did another version but i keep the background in so you guys firstly
see how this can actually look in a final gif file and i also wanted to show you this other
option that i think is quite useful here you can take certain colors away from the gif if
you need to by making them transparent all you have to do is select the color
in this box here and then you click on this button and it will get rid of it
i found this little option can be quite useful if you want to get rid of let's say the background of
a gift manually all right we have our gif there you go that wasn't very hard was it
now hopefully now you understand the basic process of making frame by frame animations
so i would encourage you to play with this and see what's possible you know with the same principles
you can easily make another animation where the graphic grows out from the side instead of the
middle by making layers that are transformed and squished onto one side like this one
another thing that's quite common is adding some light rays to your designs that are you know
blinking so it looks like it's shining you know to create that instagram stick here cute effect here
all i did is i made a couple layers where i would have these thick lines which i just quickly made
by color filling some thin rectangular selections then you build the frames in a way that one has
the rays around your graphics then the other frame doesn't in this particular case two frames are
actually enough to make a smooth animation so it couldn't be simpler or you can just simply make
your graphic move by copying your layer and move the item somewhere else i did this one quickly
but i moved the logo slightly off camera so it looks like it's dropping down something like this
once you know what you're doing you will be able to bash these out in a couple of minutes really
now just to show you some seemingly more complicated examples look at this one
no more than a handful of frames but thanks to all these subtle changes and the different
layers and the right timing it looks convincing enough and that's all you want from these really
now i feel compelled to tell you that making gifts in adobe photoshop in 2020 is oftentimes
not really the way to go it's a quick solution that you might take advantage of if you really
need to do something simple but if you want to do some more complex motion graphics you're
probably gonna have to invest your time and energy in apps like adobe premiere
pro as well as adobe after effects those are the professional apps which do look quite complicated
and intimidating at the first site i know i have been there as well but those are really the
professional apps that you're gonna have to use for more complicated stuff basically i wanted to
make this tutorial because i do believe that doing gifs in photoshop is a really nice first step into
this way of learning and understanding how motion graphics work essentially but if you want me to do
tutorials in some more advanced stuff like after effects just let me know down in the comments
and make sure that you are joining our little design tribe so you can always see
your upcoming content we make videos in the subject of art design architecture interior
design and everything in between take care guys and see you next week with another video bye
you