The Season for Dreaming

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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Some notes on getting animated GIFs to work on Tumblr

After Tumblr unceremoniously ate my answer to someone’s question yesterday (AND JUST ATE THIS POST TWICE WHEN I TRIED TO POST IT GRR), I’m going to explain how I helped take a gif that was too big for Tumblr and get it to an appropriate filesize, since I get asked about this fairly frequently.

Animated GIFs must be under 500KB to work on Tumblr (via uploading). If they’re too big, when you upload them, they won’t move.

In Windows, you can right click on the file and choose ‘properties’ to see the file size. If it is over 500KB, it’s not going to work (if it’s measuring in MB at all, that probably means it’s over 1000KB). I’m going to take this gif:

Which is 0.98MB (which is about 1003KB), and I’m going to do a few tricks to turn it into this:

(If you’re viewing this post on your dash, make sure you click the thumbnails to see the full size of these images.)

Which is similar, but only 484KB, which is why it works on Tumblr.

When you have a gif that’s too big to work on Tumblr, there are four main ways you can make the file size lower:

1. Use fewer frames (when you’re making an animated gif in GIMP, “frames” is essentially the same thing as “layers”)
2. Crop it to make it smaller in dimensions
3. Resize it to make it smaller in dimensions
4. Use fewer colors

For this animation, I’m going to use a combination of #1 and #3.

The animation is twice as large as it should be, so I know I’m going to have to make a dramatic change. One way you can get rid of a lot of frames (and therefore get the file size much lower) without making the animation itself shorte, is by deleting every other frame (the downside is the more you do this, the less smooth the animation looks). So for example, here I deleted all of the even-numbered layers.

See how at the end of each layer name it says (100ms)? That’s the amount of time you see each individual frame on your screen — 100 milliseconds. When you’re making the gif in GIMP, you probably don’t see that written there, as GIMP adds that in after you save. It figures out how many milliseconds to put there based on how you answer this question when you’re saving:

If I leave this animated at 100ms, it runs really fast, see?

I think I want to make it go slower, so I’m going to change the layers to say 200ms instead of 100ms, so that each individual frame will be shown longer.

After doing all of this, I save it again and it’s still just over 500KB. So I’m going to resize it (using Image > Scale Image…), from 477x218 to 450x206, to make it just a bit smaller. I save it one more time, and now it’s 484KB. Perfect for Tumblr!

A final note, about my original tutorial. In it, I give directions to go to Filter > Animation > Optimize (for GIF) before saving. I’m going to retract that advice, and next time I revise the tutorial I’ll remove that part. In my experience in helping people with problems like this, using Optimize with GIFs like these can cause more problems than its worth, and it does things that make it harder to edit GIFs after you save them, which is why my edited version of this person’s GIF has those weird block-y bits in between the girls’ faces (that shouldn’t happen to you when you’re making GIFs yourself).

In conclusion: Check the file size of your animated GIFs before you try and use them on Tumblr. If they are over 500KB, you may need to delete some of the layers or resize them to make them work.

As a side note, if you tried to get the original gif to be under 500KB without deleting any frames, you would have to resize it to this size:

Which may be preferable (and is much less work) if you don’t mind your GIF being smaller.

So, I know that’s a lot to think about, but I hope it helps give you a place to start if you have trouble getting your GIFs to work on Tumblr. Getting GIFs to be small enough is something a lot of us on Tumblr have to struggle with, so if you find it tricky, you’re not alone.

If you have any questions about making animated GIFs in GIMP, you can leave them in my ask box and I try to help where I can. You can also find some other posts I’ve made and questions I’ve answered about animated GIFs in my animated GIFs tag (you might just have to look amongst my GIF posts to find them, though…)

thedeadofwinter asked: Hey! Your tutorial for making a GIF in GIMP was the best I've found so far, thank you so much! I wonder, can you tell me how to add text? I can't find a tutorial anywhere! Thanks! :)

I’m glad the tutorial helped you!

There are add-ons out there for more advanced control over GIFs in GIMP, I believe, but I’ve never really worked with any so I don’t know if there is an easier way to deal with text. But this is how I do it.

The idea is that each layer represents a frame of the animation, so you want to combine the text with each frame it appears on. So if I want the same text on every frame, I just duplicate the text and put it between each layer:

Then I combine the text layers with the picture layers by going Layer > Merge Down on the text layer (I added a shortcut for this in preferences so I can just hit the shortcut, then the down arrow to go to the next layer, etc. and have them all merged in a few seconds.) Then proceed as usual. Excuse my shitty thrown together example.

Then you can have different text for different parts of the animation or fade in/out just by playing with the text layers that correspond to particular animation frames before merging them (ex. here I didn’t add a text layer to some frames, and then across three frames had them go 25%, then 50%, then 75% opacity to fade in, and did the opposite at the end of the animation to fade out).

I hope that helps.

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

Today, we are going to make an animated .gif using all free 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.)

What you need:

For easily getting screencaps from videos:

• Avidemux

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.)

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

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.

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, 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).

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 won’t need all of them. Try selecting all the even- or odd-numbered images. 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 (and probably more around 150px).

Part three: Save the animation

Once everything looks peachy, go Filters > Animation > Optimize (for GIF). When the new window comes up, go File > Save As… Give your animation a name and be sure to end it in ‘.gif’.

GIMP will give you these export options, and be sure to pick ‘Save as Animation.’

In this dialog we can control the speed of the animation. 100ms will probably be sufficient.

For a gif to work on Tumblr, it needs to be under 500kb  UPDATE: Now it’s 1MB! If your gif isn’t animating on Tumblr, you may need to cut down the file size by resizing the image or removing frames.

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

Yay!

A tip

In some cases, it won’t look good for a gif to run in a loop in this way, and you’ll want your gif to fade to black or white instead.

First, 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…). Then, create a new layer (Layer > New Layer…) and fill it with black (or white or any other color — I’m using black). Duplicate it, because you’ll need two.

Set the opacity on the first layer you made to about 50%.

Then merge it down (Layer > Merge down), so you end up with one layer that is a half-darkened version of the last frame of your image, and another layer that is all black.

You won’t want these frames to fly by at the same speed as your other frames, so you’re going to want to specify to GIMP how long those frames should last. To do this, edit the frame and put the frame delay, in milliseconds, in parentheses after the layer name. Something quicker than a normal frame, like 70-80ms, is probably good for the half-black layer, while something longer, like 800-1000ms is good for the all-black layer.

If we save the gif again using the steps above, we now have a gif that fades to black:

You can expand upon this to create a smoother transition or try and achieve other effects.

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!

I think I’m going to rewrite my GIF tutorial

The one I wrote continues to get likes and reblogs here and there and I’ve felt a little guilty that I haven’t gotten around to rewriting it. Do you have any suggestions on what you would like to see from the new tutorial?

Tutorials

Yes, I need to finish the compilation I promised first (I’m still looking for a full recording of Don’t Do Sadness/Blue Wind from Emma Hunton’s 2009 concert at Joe’s Pub SOMEONE HELP ME FIND THIS), and I’m not allowed to work on any extraneous projects until I get caught up on NaNoWriMo. However, sometime soon I’d like to do another tutorial on something.

So far I’ve posted tutorials on how to make a CD slip out of a piece of paper and also how to make your own animated gifs using all free programs.

Is there anything else (of things I probably know how to do) I should make a tutorial on? I was hoping to post a tutorial on how to make these little hand sewn dolls (I make bigger ones too) before Christmas, is that interesting?

HOW TO: Make animated GIFs (in GIMP)

EDIT: AN IMPROVED VERSION OF THIS TUTORIAL IS NOW AVAILABLE

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!

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TUMBLR LET ME TEACH YOU TO MAKE CD SLIPS

Tumblr, I buy my blank CDs and DVDs on spindles. A lot of times when I’m giving a CD/DVD to someone I run into the problem of not having a case to put them in.

ENTER ORIGAMI CD CASE FOLDING.

It’s ridiculously easy and it looks nice. I’ve linked the tutorial I originally used it from, but I’ve simplified mine a little and use a few piece of tape as… it’s more important to me that my cases stay together than to be impressive.

IGNORE MY CHIPPING NAIL POLISH IN THESE PHOTOS.

I need a case for my burned copy of A Very Potter Musical, so let’s do that. First, I go in Photoshop and design myself a case (Once you fold a few it becomes easier to figure out where things go on the paper, but want a PSD of this case?). If you’re lazy, there’s no need to design anything — you can just easily fold a blank piece of paper and then write a label on to it. But DESIGNING CASES IS FUN. For musicals I have headshots of everyone in them on the case. Time-consuming but informative!

THEN I print it. My sister just got some nice heavy paper for a project and I’m excited to use it, but there’s no problem in using plain old paper (or cool-looking paper!).

Flip the paper (so you’re looking at the back of it but not so it’s upside down…) and put your CD centered at the top and fold the sides of the paper over it.

Then take the CD and put it in the middle of the paper like so:

Fold the bottom up!

I always put a description of the thing on that part so if I lend it/give it to someone and they forget what it is they can just read the blurb.

Then the original tutorial has some other folding going on, and I’ve done it before but I don’t really find it that necessary… so instead I’m going to skip that and just put a piece of tape on either side to hold this flap in place, see:

Then stick the disk in the flap.

Fold over the top.

Fold the corners of the top flap and tape them down.

And slide the top flap inside the bottom flap! TA DA!

AND THEN YOU CAN TURN  INTO ME AND FOLD CASES FOR EVERYTHING YOU EVER BURN.

Still easier to find stuff this way than having to dump all the CDs off all my spindles…

(Source: curbly.com)