The Season for Dreaming

How to make animated gifs where only part of the image moves (in GIMP)

I do know how to do this in GIMP, though I’m going to warn you that if your gif is so big that you’d need to do this to lower the size, you’ll probably find that it’s way too much work to be worth it. Nonetheless, I’ll show you:

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There’s a new update for GIMP! I’m installing it right now, and I hear the interface has changed a bit, so it may be time for another revision of my animated gifs tutorial, don’t you think? Is there anything you’d like to request be included in the tutorial this time around?

TUTORIAL: GIMP Basic Skills!

Just a post I’ve wanted to throw together for a while to introduce you to GIMP. It’s a freeeeeee program in the vein of Photoshop, which will let you draw and edit photos and all sorts of cool things. It’s pretty powerful for a free program, and for a while it’s been my program of choice for quick edits and things, and most of the things I post on Tumblr are made in GIMP. It can be a little confusing, so this post is just going to point out how to do some basic things that might be useful to the average Tumblr user and give you a place to start if you’re new to using it. I have a tutorial I made previously on how to make your own animated GIFs in GIMP.

You can get GIMP over at http://www.gimp.org.

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HOW-TO: Make an animated gif (updated version!)

Now updated for GIMP 2.8 (if using an earlier version such as 2.6, you’ll want to use Save As… in place of Export…)!

Today, we are going to make an animated .gif using all free, open source programs with no watermarks. (This version of this tutorial is not going to cover ripping videos off YouTube, you’ll have to look into that yourself if you’re interested in that, since websites and add-ons for this are frequently changing)

What you need:

• For easily getting screencaps from videos: Avidemux (We’re using 2.5.6. Later versions may not work with this tutorial. You can find the Windows installer for 2.5.6 on SourceForge.)
• For making screencaps into animated .gifs: The GIMP (in a previous post I mistakenly said that GIMP isn’t available on Mac — actually, it is. We’re using v2.8 here.)

Download and install these as necessary.

For this example, I’m making a .gif from the 1925 silent film of The Phantom of the Opera, as it’s in the public domain and I happen to have it downloaded (doesn’t everyone?!).

Part one: Getting the screencaps

Note: The important part of this step is to amass the frames you’ll need for the animation. If Avidemux doesn’t work with your video or you otherwise can’t use it, you may need to open your video in an appropriate program and take screencaps yourself (roughly one every couple frames for the section of the video you’ll want to animate).

We’re going to need a set of screencaps from our video to form the frames of our animation, and Avidemux is very good for this.

Open your video in Avidemux. You might get messages from Avidemux about different options for dealing with your video depending on its format. This tutorial isn’t going to cover the details of Avidemux — as a general rule, just pick one, and if that doesn’t work, open the video again and pick the opposite.

Find the place you want your animation to start (try using the arrow keys to nudge to the perfect spot). Click the button. Find where you want the animation to end, and click the button.

Now File > Save > Save Selection as JPEG Images… Avidemux will save for you all of the frames in your selection as individual .jpgs, which could lead to a lot of images, so give your set of images a name and save them in an appropriate place.

Check to make sure Avidemux saved the images correctly.

Part two: Create the Animation

Open GIMP and go to File > Open as Layers…

If you used Avidemux to generate images for you, you probably have a lot of them and will have trouble keeping the filesize low enough if you use all of them. Try selecting all the even- or odd-numbered images (in Windows, you can select multiple, non-consecutive files by holding ctrl while you click them). Hit ‘Open’. GIMP will use each layer as a frame of your animation.

Now you’re going to want to crop and resize as necessary. In GIMP you crop using this tool: Click and drag to choose the area you want to keep and hit enter  to crop it. To resize, go Image > Scale Image… You probably don’t want most gifs to be over maybe 250px at most in height or width unless they’re really short.

(If you’re making a Photoset, you might like to know that in rows with one image, that image should be 500px wide. In rows with two images, each should be 245px wide. In rows with three images, each should be 160px wide.)

Part three: Save the animation

Choose File > Export…

Give your animation a name and be sure to end it in ‘.gif’.

GIMP will give you these export options, and be sure to check ‘as animation.’

In this dialog we can control the speed of the animation. 100ms delay will probably be sufficient, but feel free to adjust as necessary.

For a gif to work on Tumblr, it needs to be under 1MB! If your gif is frozen on Tumblr, you may need to cut down the file size by resizing the image further or removing frames.

Using this process, we can produce a simple gif like this:

Yay!

Further Reading From Me

• Reducing file size of your gifs
• Some notes on timing of gifs
• Adding text (unfortunately a rather roundabout method)
• Fading to black or white
• Some notes on adjusting lighting and coloring (unfortunately this isn’t too pleasant either)

Conclusion

Hopefully now you understand how to make simple gifs on your own. If you run into problems with this tutorial, you can leave me a message in my ask box and I’ll try my best to help you out.

Go forth with the power of gifs!

GIFs!

Have you seen my post on how to make animated gifs using all free programs? Here’s some more tips I’ve learned since:

• Open As Layers! Instead of dragging the files into GIMP, use this and hold ctrl or shift to select the files that will make up your frames and it’ll automatically make them layers.
• You don’t need to mark the frame duration on every single layer — just mark the ones that will be different than the majority, and then when you go to save there’s an option for you to choose what the duration will be where not specified. (So, for example, if most of my frames will be 100ms except for a couple, I’ll mark the duration in the layer name for the ones that will be different, and then when I save, I’ll just tell it to make all unmarked frames 100ms)

Makes life easier.

NOW HERE’S SOME GIFS I JUST MADE.

EDIT: SERIOUSLY TUMBLR WHY DO YOU HAVE TO PUT EACH ONE ON A SEPARATE LINE STOP IT

HOW TO: Make animated GIFs (in GIMP)

EDIT: Please use this updated tutorial instead

Animated GIFs are fun. They’re all over Tumblr. Yet they’re a mystery to a lot of people — I’ve seen many a messy gif made with sites like gifsoup and people admitting they just don’t know where to begin in making their own. Allow me to teach you*, Tumblrites, how to make a simple animated gif from a YouTube video using all entirely free programs. Awesome. (I just figured out gifs in GIMP last night so experienced GIMP users should forgive any GIMP stupidity contained in this tutorial :P)

*assuming you aren’t on a Mac because I’m not sure GIMP is available for you. Everyone else should be okay. I’ll be demoing from Windows 7 (don’t hurt me.)

Today, I will be making this simple gif:

THINGS YOU WILL NEED (THEY ARE ALL FREE)

• Mozilla Firefox (Because of the next bullet point)
• 1-Click YouTube Video Download (Firefox Add-On) — this is for getting the video off YouTube (if you don’t need to get a video off YouTube it doesn’t matter, obviously, but most people seem to want to know this part so I will cover it)
• Avidemux — this is a video editing program that will quickly and easily take a chunk of a video and save all the frames as separate images for you, which will make the whole process more painless. Awesome.
• GIMP — It’s an image editing program (like Photoshop but for people who don’t have money (but have morals)). It will allow us to make our gif, and it’s pretty awesome free alternative to Photoshop for general image editing things outside of making gifs as well.

Download/Install those as necessary and then ONWARD!

Find a YouTube video you’d like to make a gif from (the section you wish to animate should be no more than a few seconds long for best results). Using 1-Click YouTube Video Download, download it to your computer — choose “MP4” (or “HD”) formats. I’m going to download this promotional video for the Japanese production of Spring Awakening.

Now open Avidemux and open your video (as a side note, if Avidemux won’t open the file, try dragging the file onto it and see if that works). If you get an “H.264 detected” message just click “No.”

Find the place you want your animation to start (try using the arrow keys to nudge to the perfect spot). Click the button. Find where you want the animation to end, and click the button. Now File > Save > Save Selection as JPEG Images… and give your set of images a name (you might want to create a new folder to save them in just to stay organized).

Check and make sure Avidemux successfully saved a bunch of JPGs where you told it to (there should probably be around 50-100 images depending on how long your animation is):

Awesome. Now let’s open GIMP — we’re going to have it take all of those frames and spit them back out as an animation!

Once GIMP is open, drag the first image in the sequence (the one ending in 0000) into GIMP. Now you’re going to want to drag about every other image on top of that one (so they all will end up layers within the same document). The reason we don’t drag in every one is it’s not really necessary — the animation will still look smooth without every frame, and we have to be careful about how large our file size ends up.

Make sure you can see the Layers dialogue (Windows > Dockable Dialogs > Layers) — it should be full of all of your images.

Now you’re going to want to crop and resize as necessary. In GIMP you crop using this tool: Click and drag to choose the area you want to keep and hit enter  to crop it. To resize, go Image > Scale Image… You probably don’t want most gifs to be over maybe 250px at most in height or width.

Now we need to tell GIMP how long it should play each of these frames. To do this, we double-click on the name of a layer and add the number of milliseconds it should last for in parentheses after the name, like so, and hit enter:

100ms should be pretty good for something like this. Do this for every layer.

Let’s check out how it’s looking, shall we? Go Filters > Animation > Playback and click the play button. If everything’s going right, it should look good! Let me show you how to make it fade to black if you so desire, and then we’re almost finished:

Fading to black

I’m going to keep this pretty simple. First I will go to the last frame of the animation (that’s the layer at the very top of the layer list) and duplicate it (Layer > Duplicate Layer, or there’s a little icon right at the bottom of the Layers window that does it). Then I will make a new layer (Layer > New Layer etc), make sure my foreground color is black, and go Edit > Fill with FG Color.

Over in the Layers window there’s a slider to change the opacity of a layer. I’m going to want this black layer to be at about 50% opacity.

Then go Layer > Merge Down. We’ve now successfully created a layer that is partly faded to black.

Now make another new layer again and go Edit > Fill With FG Color to fill it with black again. You’re probably going to want the black layer to stick around a little longer, so I’ll set mine for 1000ms instead of 100ms (and I’m going to go back and set my half-black layer from the previous step to about 70ms just to make that transition a little smoother).

All Done?!

Once everything looks peachy, go Filters > Animation > Optimize (for GIF). When the new window comes up, go File > Save As…, give it a name, go to Select File Type at the bottom of the window and choose GIF Image. It’ll ask you if you want to Merge Visible Layers or Save As Animation — we want to save an animation of course! Hit Export. You’ll probably want to keep all the options in the next window as the defaults, so just click Save.

A ha! An animated gif!

A little roundabout perhaps (especially if you’re used to Photoshop as I am…)? Perhaps. But did you just make a gif all by yourself for free and without any weird tags from websites or anything slapped on it? Yes you did. And I’m sure it’s beautiful.

GO FORTH WITH THE POWER OF GIFs.

I hope this was of some use and not too confusing. If you have any questions about this tutorial (or spot any mistakes) you can drop it in my ask box and I’ll see what I can do for you.

Now I need to go quickly eat lunch because I spent almost all of my break between classes writing this. The things I do for you, Tumblr.

DOODLE FAILURE

I’m trying to do Tumblr Doodles in GIMP (Photoshop encourages me to try too hard) but it’s acting really weird with my tablet — like, the way I move my pen isn’t matching the way the brush is moving on the screen. It doesn’t do this in Photoshop or in GIMP on my laptop. Ima reinstall GIMP and see if that fixes it.

BUT IN RELATED NEWS despite the fact that I’m here complaining, I do recommend GIMP generally speaking, so if you’re reading this and you think there are no free alternatives to Photoshop, GIMP is pretty fancy and you should try it.