CLMR
katrina. seventeen. female.
i make stuff .
Tutorial: Overlay Gifs


A lot of people have been asking me how I make overlay gifs. I’ve tried to explain as best as I could but I am one to admit that i’m very shit at explaining and teaching things, so sorry if I completely mess this up. I have pictures though! 

Difficulty: Medium? You need to have some basic gif making skills for this. 
Program: Photoshop CS5
Feel free to ask questions if you don’t understand something. 

> Import the clips you want to gif by going to File > Import > Video Frames to Layers. Determine the number of frames you want in the gif and make sure both have the same number of frames. 

 

Mine are to twelve frames each of John from ASiP and Sherlock in ASiB.

> Sharpen and color as you wish. I’m making John black and white and Sherlock red. I’ve re-sized the two clips so that their heights are both 500px, but if you want one to be bigger than the other or smaller, you can resize to your liking.

(Make sure the clip you want as your base (the one you’ll be putting an overlay onto) has a lot of blacks and shadows. A lot of white does not work with overlaying.) 

> You can either Flatten Frames to Layers (click the lines with the arrow pointing down at the right of the the Animation palette) or put frames and coloring into a group. I’m putting them in a group just in case I want to adjust the coloring. If flattening frames, group afterwards, especially the overlay gif, as it plays a vital role in making the gif. 

 

> Next, go to File > New and create a new file. I set my canvas to 500x500 as that’s usually how I do my big gifs. 

> Go to the base gif. Select every frame from the palette and copy frames. Paste frames to the new document and choose Paste Over Selection. If you grouped, your gif will stay in the group. 

> Move where you want you base to be. I moved John so his profile is in the middle and there’s a big white space by the back of his head, so I just painted in black behind his head with a brush on a new layer. 
 

> Copy the overlay frames just like you did the base’s and paste it over the selection of the graphic. Move it to your liking.
 

(If you kept your coloring with the group: If you move down the overlay frames, you can see that its coloring can affect the bases’s coloring. Don’t worry about that as that can be easily done away with.)
 
(Like this.) 

> Set the overlay frames to ‘Lighten’ or ‘Screen’, whichever looks good for you. You can adjust the brightness of your base and overlay to play around with it by putting a Curves layer or something inside the group of each one’s frames. Set the delay to your liking. 

 

> I encourage you to play around with the colorings and settings as it differs with different kinds of screencaps. Sherlock tends to have more contrast and this seasons has given us a LOT of silhouettes (asfjdksajdfkdsajfsdaf) so it’s very easy to use as base. 

> Then save and you’re done!

Here’s the result. 
 

Uh, I hope that helped.

1 year ago · 3173 · ©
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