Make A Short Animated GIF Using Photoshop

1. GIF intro: Do you want to add some life to your illustrations? Drawings? Paintings? If Yes, then this tutorial is for you, since one illustration is alive, of course, but to makes and moving. So it's almost like animation, except we will be using only two key franks. So short and sweet. I do. Hi, everyone. My name is Anna. I'm an illustrator and a blogger. Right now I'm working on my own project That's called your art Pat. You can definitely check it out. Only leave a link the low. I also work on a couple of different projects, such as editorial logo. And right now I'm learning character design because I feel like that's my next step. In this short tutorial, I will teach you how to create a short gift. Simple, Easy. It's gonna be pretty fast. I'm gonna walk you through how to set up your Photoshopped properly. I'll also walk through like the ideation pro says, like where does do those ideas come from? You will see me sketch out my idea, Then go over with it, um, in light art and then color it and then all should also show you how to export it properly . and for our class project. I'll also ask you to create a little short gift. Um, for my example, I will only be using two key frames. Since it's not really an animation tutorial, it's more like a gift tutorial and usually there around two key frames. So you will learn how to do that, and then you can show me what you come up with. I would really love to see them. Um, if we will have a couple of people uploading projects, I will also create a block post on your path dot com and feature them on there. If you would like to. Of course, you can just let me know if you do or don't. Well, this way people can find out about your art, just get inspired. So if you wanted to be anonymous is totally fine. This while you can also, you can also exported as a video and then, um, telling me on instagram live, my instagram lengthen below and then I can share them with all of my followers. Maybe they will like it. Maybe we'll call you back. It's just overall good for people all around the world to see what your creativity is like So this course is for people who already have a basic knowledge of Photoshopped. Um, I would say how toe Pretty much used, like paintbrush to race or two. So I won't be really going over any of those. I will be going over timeline frames and stuff like that and plus some tips and tricks that I use along the way so I could help you, not only in creating your gifts, but maybe animations or just illustrations than paintings. After all, also here is the animation will be making today together. Um, you will see my whole process from beginning to the end as I start my file. And as I prepare it for the Internet, you can export it as a gift, or you can export it as the video and then just tag pay on it so I can feature you in my instagram page. Anyway, I hope you really enjoy the lesson. And, um, good luck to you guys. Caesar 2. GIF Step1: Welcome back. If you decided to take this course. I am so grateful. And I'm so excited to see what you guys are gonna come up with. So step what? Preparing your workspace. All right, so here's step one. We're gonna go to photo shop there. I'm gonna click file new, decide on our, um, like what? Size? You want it for me? I'll go. I'm going to go with 8.5 11 and I'm gonna keep it at 300 d p. I Even though I do know that for Web you will need 72 d p I. But we will fix them later. Um, I prefer starting with 300. So in case I needed later on for any other projects, I will have it available. Sense downsizing. It's easy. Upsizing. Not so much. All right. So usually this is what you're thing will look like. If you are set up for painting, you will have your canvas, your lay years, colors and everything. But we're gonna go to a window, we're gonna go go to work space, and then we're going to click on motion is there's many different options. But right now we're working on a gift. So that's motion. And as you see, timeline pops up, we click create video time light on to start creating. We can use this, but that would be for a different course. So I'm just gonna go to the bottom left and click on this, and now we can see key frames. So that's our timeline right now. And this is our first key frame in five seconds. So yeah, everything says on there we can also change. Can change how many times we warned the tumbling to play. Right now, it's kind of irrelevant, since we only have one key frame, but people use it later on. We can also play pause, go back and stuff like that. Um, we can also Tween That's a button right there, Andi creating new the here, Doc Duplicate selected one. Okay, the Tween we will talk about in our bonus section. All right, so, um, let's get to it. Um I will show you how basically it works. Bye. Oh, yeah. Press later. Bianchi board too quickly. Start working with a brush. That's like my quick tip so quickly. Sketch and character just to show you how the timeline works. All right? I'm not trying hard here. I'm just going very roughly in. This is just to help you understand in future us. Do what I'm doing. Later on, I decided to move up my image. I pressed command T and I moved it up. That, like, lets me move it up, rotated, flip it and stuff like that. Okay, now I'm gonna click, create new ones you can notice. The Tookie friends are exactly the same right now, so if I create a new layer, it won't change anything. But if I read in your key frame of the bottom, you will add it clear frame. So we don't need that later. Now I'm gonna double IC eight, the previous layer. And just with a few things again. Usually I would redraw the whole thing, but because it's just a quick sketch to show you how this thing works, I'm gonna kind of cheap, then decide to do it a little bit faster. So here's her sexy lips. So no, I took a few things, and as you can see at the back now, the two layers are active, so we have to activate the only ones who make it viewable. The only layer you want to see is viewable. Second key frame. The secondary is available now. We have the two key frames that will be moving side by side whenever we decide to, and we can decide on how long we want them to. If you want to change both click shift and this big to. And then when you change the setting, it changes for both of them and that click play or press space bar, there is your gift. It's pretty simple, huh? 3. GIF Step2: and welcome back to step two sketching and planning your gift in this lesson, we will go through the planning process. How do you come up with the idea? What do you want to do for this project? I won't suggest going with something that maybe talks about your hobby. That's exactly what I did. Um, art is not a hobby. Art is my life. But everybody is a hobby. My hobby is playing on a guitar. So I decided to create a short animation that shows how I play on guitar. Pretty neat, huh? So maybe you can do your own hobby anyway. Let's get straight to it. I hope you enjoy it. And good luck. All right. So I'm going to open up my Photoshopped file and then start going at it. I'm just gonna create you fall again. I'm making 8.5 11 with 300 dp eye. As we discussed before. Um, and that I'm just going to start sketching. I was thinking about an idea, and I decided to do something. Doug represents me in a way. So I decided to go with the hobby and as my hobby is playing on a guitar um, I figured, why not do that? That should be fun for a turkey frame gift. Um, as you can notice right here, I add lines to the side of my character. That's because I know that my character is approximately 5.5 heads tall, and it has a very oval had. That's a character I create at a few days back, so maybe I can make a little tutorial on that as well. But I'm just overall sketching and very roughly an idea off what it's going to be like, that I'm going to create a new layer and do what they say to be on in skin, which pretty much in animation means that you have your basically your capacity down. And then you work on top of it on a new layer just to have a reference at the back. They used to. Animators used to do it before on a lightbox Styles quote, and we're done. So here was the stuff, too. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you'll supposed all of your sketches under our project. So another dollars students can look at them, give you some feedback and help you perfect her fact. Your art. Anyway, Uh, good luck. Can't wait to see where you come up with. See you next lesson. 4. Gif Step 3 linework: Welcome back, everyone. Step three line. So my sketches you already saw already kind of planned it out there very rough and sketchy , and in some cases, that's great. So maybe in some cases I would just use my rough work for this, though I want to create a line work to clean it up a little bit, Not so crazy, and they're not going to go over it with, like, perfect details. It's still movement. I'm moving on that image on my character. Um, so I just want to keep her rough, but still a little bit more clean. So let's get to it. And I hope you enjoy it. All right, so now I'm just creating a new layer on top off my previous a rough work. As you can see, it's layer three. I'm taking a black ink pencil. I'm still working with pencil, but you can work with any rush you like in any style you like. I still want to keep it rough and sketchy, since it is movement. So I just thought that would be cool to have a pretty catchy rather than defined line work . And I'm just going over the sketch with black pencil. As I mentioned before, it's on the new layer. The reason for that is that later on, I'm planning to turn off the sketch. And if I was working on the same layer, I would have to go in and probably, like, erase everything, so that's not too convenient. Um, so what's the point off line work? Why can't you just go in and do your line work right away? Well, let me just tell you this we're not perfect. Um, unless you're super amazing artist, which I'm sure you're gonna be someday or your right now and you have that ability to create perfect lines right away. Then it is good to redraw your image as many times as you like. Sometimes two, sometimes three. Sometimes I go over my lines, even if I think they're looked great just one more time one last time to make it look great for the second image. I go and do exactly the same thing. Create a new layer on top of my original sketch, and I go over it with a black pencil. It makes it easier to have my sketches in different colors such as red or blue because then when I do my actual line work, I am not confused by, um, the other black lines, right, because they're they're blue. So obviously it is a sketch. If I'm not sure us to what I should do next. And how should I make the image cohesive with the previous one? I sometimes, as you can see, turn on just for a 2nd 1st layer. And that really helps me understand how I can make the movement look even smoother than it is. And, as you can see, sometimes line appear and disappear. What I'm doing is I'm trying to create a line with one brush stroke. But if it looks terrible, then I just controls that. So redux and just try again, destroy again until it's all ready to go. Now what I'm gonna do is clean it up a little bit. So one and two layers one s two s are the sketch layers. Makes it easy for me to understand what's going on. No, I'm good and goto windows the motion and creating a timeline just to see how my animation works before caller. Then I don't wanna have any troubles later on, it's harder to fix it with color rather than without. So I just went through the steps I explained before Click On Forever. I wanted looping forever so I can notice every mistake. And here is the animation pretty neat, but I don't like how it moves so fast, So I decided to change 1 to 5 seconds. It's a little better, but I do think that the 1st 1 should be longer than the other one. So I'm just gonna change that right now. All right, so 1st 1 is a little bit longer. Second one's more longer, and I like how it looks now. The only thing I didn't like is that the leg looks like it's way too far, and it's just anatomically incorrect. So I moved it a little bit over, and I looks much more better and cohesive that I noticed a couple of funny things like that . The circle inside is missing. Ah ha! That there's no hoodie on the 2nd 1 Um, and you know what? That's great that I did notice that that's why you always check before putting any colors in. Since you are more able to see all the mistakes, then I was checking every single part one by one. If I like how it looks, it looks cohesive. And that I noticed that I have no hands. Absolutely no left hand for my character. That would be a great animation, wouldn't it, if I called it in. So I decided to add the men with a little bit of change again. Since I do want all off things in my animation moving, nothing crazy. Just simple and fun. Yeah. Okay. Anna struck Waas gone. So I'm just gonna add this in very quickly for both of them, since I do want her to feel more comfortable and have a strap rather than just pretending to hold the guitar in her hands, Which wouldn't be that comfortable or realistic, Corporal. And I think the stops at a nice try and go over there, which is a nice design. Hey, I hope you enjoyed that for your little project. If you want to, I would love to see your line work in motion so you can go to the last stab video on how to save your file and upload it and feel free to upload Just your line work without no caller in it. Maybe you like it more. So just do that. And then maybe you can add some color and do that again. Anyway, I can't wait to see your art, So let's get to it. See you next step. 5. GIF Bonus Tip Tween: Alrighty. So here is our bonus step. We will talk about what is this cool button right here. It's a twin button, and here you can decide how many frames you want. Double. And you've leads. Five. Still. Just stick with that. We're click, OK? And then you will notice that you have five extra frames in your timeline. Pretty awesome, right? So what between button does Is it creeds A middle? A bunch of metal layers that are having that are just different capacity for each layer. So it kind of like drops the capacity of the first layer while picking up the passage of the second layer. Now, we can also go ahead and change how long they all are Click shift and hold if you decide to do it for all of them. And you can also click that little button here and duplicate all of them. The only thing is that I think I selected it from right to left. So when I duplicated it, duplicated it, like, selected and went the other way, so it didn't look that great. So I'm just gonna quickly readjusted right now is gonna move it around. Sort of looks Waisman there. There you go. See how one disappears and the other one appears in front of it with cholera. It looks even better since you can really see the line work. Okay, so here we have hurt going down and going up by using the Tween option you can. You're welcome to go ahead and play with that. And I think it would be really fun. Yeah. So I hope that little bonus was kind of cool, but we have a bigger project of our hands, so let's get to it. 6. GIF Step 4 coloring: Welcome back, everyone. So Step four coloring in this lesson, we will color our gift underneath the line work. We previously created it, and we're pretty much you're gonna be super close to finishing up. I'm so excited. Good luck. And I hope you really enjoy this already. So now we have our animation, so get almost ready to go on that. We're just going to start calling it in. So I created a new layer. I'm gonna name a collar and put it underneath the line. Work and the sketch. Now, you can call your gift any car you like, but I'm gonna be using my previous collars I created for this particular character. Whoa. And then I noticed that there's actually lines crossing through fingers, which is not supposed to be happening. So I'm just gonna go to our line, work layer and race quickly. So yeah, I'm just gonna start quickly coloring in all of the details by using previously decided on colors. You can use any brush. You can make it look very clean if you like to like a little bit of messiness in my stuff. So I just picked the brush. That's not the easiest to color and precisely with, but I think that's the beauty of it. Um as I was calling in legs, I realized it was a little tart. So I decided to try selecting it with a select two and then calling it in like that and then just adding a little more, um, scratching details to the side so it looks cohesive with the rest off the image. Just like that, erasing if I don't like something, adding Sketch Innis adding details. Um, I'm just overall going at it. You don't need anything crazy with your image. Just like have fun. Another thing you could do is you could call it an all in great and then create a new layer on top and clip. Sorry, Uh, click right and select clipping mask and just call her over it if you wanted to be clean again. But, yeah, I'm not going for a clean effect here. It's a movement. It's singing. It's just having fun Sums gonna make it look like it is fun and messy, all right, adding a few details here and there, but nothing crazy, to be honest. Then I decided to create a shadow. I decided to make it purple. So I created a new layer underneath the collar labor. Okay. And the reason why I did that is because what if I don't like the purple after? To make your process easier for coloring in the second image, I would suggest creating a collar reference layer which you see me do just a few seconds back where I picked all the colors I used in the first image and put them on a site in a different layer. So I can easily get rid of it later on. And that just makes it easier for me to pick out colors rather than just going back and forth between the first and the second layer. I have it all on the side, so it makes it way ways. Um, a quick tip, um, press cult control G or command E. If you want a de select your selection, Um, my friend is like keyboard shortcuts. Since they do save a lot of time, especially if you use it off constantly. It just makes it weighs here to work. And then in some point, you start. Stop thinking about it. You just press be for brush press eye for eye dropper to press space bar to move your canvas around and you just don't think about it. You just do it and it's really fun to I do use for my vacuum tabloid, So I have a few buttons on the left that I modified, which makes it a little bit easier. Modifier, tablets, guys, whatever use the most do. It created the new layer for shadow, as I did with previous fun and moved it a little bit. So I want everything in my image to move again, checking for any mistakes or any inconsistencies on my hat with the previous one. And then I decided to add a little bit of background music notes. There are going to be moving together with our image just for fun that I copied a couple of them insurance for them around to make more of them. I could have drawn them just being lazy or efficient. You can call it a this on. Then I copy the layer with notes again moved them around a little bit. So both of them are different. All right. Hi. So did you like it? This step for is done. Now we're going to go to the step by the final step saving and uploading her artwork. See you soon. 7. Step 5 - Saving and Uploading: Hey, Step five. Saving and uploading your artwork. What were you guys? You finished the last sent. It was short, right? Short and sweet. I do hope you learned at least something. And I do hope you're gonna go and start creating if you haven't yet, so you can share your stuff with me. Um, yeah. So in this lesson, I'll show you how to export your files and just have them done and ready to share with the world. Alright, So first things first. Quick tip control ass or command as to save your work. What I'm doing right now is I'm creating a rectangle 8.5 by 8.5. That's how I'm going to cut into my illustration. I checked to see if everything is in place and everything iss And when I'm satisfied with the size of my rectangle, I just simply go on and crop it. The reason I don't just crop it right away is because you wanna have a precise size, something that people use a lot. So, in case you need to use it on some kind of media or whatever, you know, your sizable fit well and rectangles are fitting Well, probably everywhere, I would say. And also, when you have a rectangle in place, when you start cropping on the crop, tool snaps automatically to your rectangle and just crops it to the size like and then boom , it's done. I don't think I did notice, though, is that my illustration isn't really centered or anything. So I decided to fix that a little bit, first of all, cleaned out by deleted their rectangle. And then secondly, I decided to select all of layers that are visible on first. Keep right. Pick up movinto, hold shift and press right arrow to move it to the right a little bit. I moved it six times, so six clicks. Now I can do this same with the other one, So I'm going to go to the other one. Cliff Click shipped and sorry. Apologists click, commend and pick off. Let layers that you want to move the visible layers and then just move it again. And now it's again consistent and centered. That's exactly what we want to do, right? Centered, consistent and just looks great. I like her. All right. So now on option you have is true. Turn off the background and save it is PNG what PNG is. You can find out Google, but pretty much it's an image without a background. So whatever you put on the background, it's see through right so you can have the background of whatever you put it on. Now, the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna change the resolution to 72 Image, image, size and change resolution. That's their resolution. Internet is doing great way. So most off websites require you to have a 72 d p I resolution for gift. You can keep it at 300 though it's all up to you that we're gonna go to export export ass and say for that. Here you see your illustration and then in presets, you can decide to pick being G 81 28 sort gift 1 28 But I do like more colors. So I decided to do 2 56 to 56 will just give you a bigger variety of color. So it most probably will show exact colors as you have on your image and then looping options. I like to click forever, so it never stops. Since it is only to keep France. And here is a preview or what our gift will look like. All right, You can also previewed on the web, and they were just going to click, save on, decide where you're saving it, because they, um And then pretty much just click save, and you will have your image ready for Internet ready for sharing. Right. So then you will see a file like this html file, click it open and opens in your web browser. And here is your gift. Pretty meat. Okay, Now we're gonna go to a different saving option, which is file safe, ATS. So export us, and then we're going to export it as a gift. Right? And click export all and export. All right now you haven't seen as a gift. Looks just like a J back in it. When you open it up, it's still date back damage, since that's how Audrey never going to go to our last step, export and then render video, huh? We can decide on what quality of the video we want, but I would keep it at 30 frames per second. The only thing is, it's gonna be only two key frames. So it's going to be 1.5 seconds we're going to do now is we're going to dip lick eight. All of our key friends to as many as you like it would depends on how long you on your video to be. I just decided to go with 16 and then I'm gonna click exporter, run video high quality 30 frames per second and render. I just gotta wait a little bit as it renders. And here's our video that is ready to share on here on Instagram pretty much anywhere. Oh, you're done. Please go to my next video to hear a few words from me. I asked you what you should do next. What I think you should do next. I've really enjoyed this on and I hope you did too. We'll see you soon. 8. GIF Final: Hi. So welcome back again. This is our last video off our lesson. I truly hope you enjoyed it. And, um, you learn something? You hopefully, um Anyway, not to take your time any longer. I can't wait to see your stuff. I really, really want to see it. So do uploaded under the projects. Also, as I mentioned before, um, it's quite a few people upload their stuff. I would love to do a block post about it on your path dot com, which I will leave on the link down below. So if you want to participate, police let me know. Um, also, you can export your file as a video and personal instagram and time me, I would love to see it. Maybe even shared with my followers. Please, please do that. I can't wait to see your stuff. And I really enjoyed working with you. Can't wait to see you again if you like my videos. If you have any suggestions to what kind of tutorials I should do next, follow me and, um let me know. I will create whatever you guys need. I really love doing this. And I hope you do enjoy my videos. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for taking this time to watch through all of them and hopefully I'll see you soon .