GIFS are big right now & I’ve gotten several questions about them lately. So, I thought I’d give you a top-of-the-waves post about them!

1. Be patient with yourself. It took me 6 hours to get through a video tutorial to figure out how to make my first gif. Back when I first started making them (maybe 2016, lol), I was not very familiar with photoshop. Even worse, I didn’t really understand some of the terminology, so I learned to make gifs on repetition. But I learned. I can now make a gif in just a few minutes and not feel like I’m about to sweat bullets. Since the time I first posted this blog, there have been some amazing gif guides released by other photographers that you can find with a quick search.

2. The best gifs are built on stability. If you’ve got steady hands or a tripod, this is going to make a huge difference in the way your gif turns out.

3. For those of you who have played around with or are familiar with making gifs, there is an awesome little tool when you run the script to stack your images that says “attempt to automatically align source images.” Even if you nailed the steady hands or used a tripod, this guy is going to make sure that it lines up all of your photos. Sometimes, there is a little excess that will need to be cropped off. On occasion (like 5% of the time), the “attempt to automatically align sour images” tool doesn’t work and I have to run the script again without it.

3. II: The “propagate frames” feature on your layers section applies the changes that you make in one frame to all of the frames. If I need to add a mask or do some brushing, this is so helpful.

4. Resize your animated timeline before you export. The files you are using to make a gif are huge. Photoshop does give custom options for this. I resize to 25%.

5. Before exporting, I make sure to set my animated timeline to “loop forever.” When you are ready to export, you are going to “Save for Web (legacy)”, hit the tab that says “Original”, and save. This is GIF format. You can only use this to upload to platforms that support the GIF format.

5. II: If you want to share your GIF on social media, you are going to have to turn it into an MP4. BUT, MP4 format does not loop forever. So, before I export, I duplicate the timeline frames 2 or 3 times, depending on how long it makes the video. Then you’ll go down to where your animated timeline is & click on “covert to video timeline.” Then click “render video.” You can post the MP4 format to most online outlets & social platforms. These are the ones you want to send to your clients too!

I’m sure this won’t be the last time that I share on this topic & will try to share some resources on making GIFS soon! Until then, keep following #dakotamakesgifs or head over to my GIFS page to see more!

XO, Dakota Chasity