Animated Gifs

[Jahled]

Mind you, it wasn't my gif... I plucked it from a site...

 

Who that, Jahled? Zooda?

 

I think it's safe to assume so... Anyway, it's a psychotic evil fiendmaster that get's up to all sorts of dreadful stuff. Look what evidence I found of it's wickedness whilst exploring the wild-interior of the wilderness of the internet:

 

http://www.sayagain.co.uk/b3tapix/images/truncated.gif

 

Smells of lightsaber if you ask me...

[DarthTofu]

... ... Chef Brian strikes again...

[Jahled]

Looky what I found:

 

http://www.sayagain.co.uk/b3tapix/images/coppolawars.gif

[Defender_16]

I think the title needs some strings leading from it to make it more obvious from the beginning.

 

Moving on...

http://lolzing.com/albums/GIFsMthruZ/ohnoyoudidnt.gif

 

http://lolzing.com/albums/GIFsMthruZ/prayerassault.gif

[Guest Scathane]

This thread has been viewed 22,077 times!!!

[Defender_16]

Wow! That's almost as many droids at this clone trooper takes out!

 

http://lolzing.com/albums/GIFsMthruZ/Starwarscloned.gif

[Mad78]

And nearly 100 pages! How about that.

[Jahled]

And nearly 100 pages! How about that.

 

Sort of obvious to me. Where else do you know that when you you arrive at a thread you are 97%* guaranteed to find Star Wars related humor of one sort or another. I never intended to set the thread in motion as it now is, as you will see by delving into the site's distant past, but it has evolved as it has done, leaving us with an obvious place to deposit generally Star Wars related stuff/gibberish we either make oursleves or find that makes us laugh. We all contribute to it as well, so how cool is that!

 

*3% evil fluffy kittens

[DarthTofu]

Hehe... Kittens... Guess now its up to me to find a good animated gif somewhere to post up here... Say, come to think of it, is there a program that I can download somewhere to make my own animated gifs and learn to do so pain-free, or is it one of those 'ridiculously intelligent people only' clubs?

[Mad78]

Learning to make a gif takes maximum 30 minutes.

http://www.whitsoftdev.com/unfreez/ Here is a free program which you can use to make basic stuff. Though you shall need an image editor.

[Jahled]

Hehe... Kittens... Guess now its up to me to find a good animated gif somewhere to post up here... Say, come to think of it, is there a program that I can download somewhere to make my own animated gifs and learn to do so pain-free, or is it one of those 'ridiculously intelligent people only' clubs?

 

Whilst I confess to not being 'an expert' virtually everything I know about making a gif or using Photoshop i've had to learn myself, and I left school without any qualifications. So figure. What Mad linked above though is probably helpful on the subject.

[Mad78]

BTW:

100 Page reached!!!

http://img99.exs.cx/img99/8577/yupi3ti.gif

[DarthTofu]

Learning to make a gif takes maximum 30 minutes.

http://www.whitsoftdev.com/unfreez/ Here is a free program which you can use to make basic stuff. Though you shall need an image editor.

Thank you, I'll download that when I get home

BTW: 100 Page reached!!!

W00!

[Mad78]

But DT i highly recoment you give Adobe ImageReady a try. It is the king of all gif makers.

[DarthTofu]

Will do... Though that one has to be downloaded or bought, right?

 

Edit: I discovered my own evil kitten fluffiness on the internet- IT'S CATZILLA! http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a169/DarthTofu/kitty2.jpg

[Mad78]

What Fluffiness!!!

 

ImageReady ships with Photoshop.

[Guest Scathane]

How do you create an animated gif in ImageReady?

[Mad78]

I shall write up a small tutorial a bit later.

[Jahled]

I shall write up a small tutorial a bit later.

 

Beat you to it M dude!

 

Aghaa! Of all the questions to ask on a Sunday Scathe!!

 

Ok. Let's make an animated of Leia smoking a fag. I'm going to guide you through this using Photoshop and then Image Ready. Virtually all the work is done in Photoshop. We use Image Ready to animate our gif. It's just like regular film, all a trick of the eye.

 

First off we need a source picture. I found this one of Leia lurking on my HD. Open it up in Photoshop:

 

>Image>adjustments>auto levels

>auto contrast

>auto colour

 

If you think any of the subsequent adjustments are to dramatic you can fade the adjustment by going to Edit>fade auto level or whatever.

 

Next step,find a picture of a fag and copy and paste it in to the Leia picture.You will see in your Layer window in Photoshop you now have the fag as 'Layer 1.' You can adjust how the fag is proportioned by going to Edit>Transform>skew (or whatever-the options should be obvious). Give it some simple blur as well depending on the contrast of the fag picture's source. Leia now has a fag in her mouth. Cool, or bad, depending on your stance on smoking, but this is a galaxy far,far awar right, plus she's a slave in Jabba's court, and is probably bored out of her mind. But anyway.

 

Next step: Layer>new layer. We want to creat a third layer inwhich to create a smoke effect, because if we didn't have any smoke there wouldn't be an animated gif and this tutorial would be pointless.Whilst in this third layer use the rectangular marquee tool to create a reasonably thick rectangle just above the tip of the fag running up the length of the picture.Edit>Fill>50% Gray

This body of gray in our third layer is going to be our smoke. Put it at about 80% opacity, a descent amount of gaussian blur(Filter>Blur>Gaussian blur)and smoke ripple distortion(Filter>distort>ripple) It now more or less looks like smoke. Save for web as something like Leia_fag_01. This is our first frame of our gif. I reckon we'll need about five or six or so to create our visual illusion.

 

Filter>Distort>ripple (again, or shortcut Control F). The smoke has moved. Save for web as Leia_fag_02, and repeat this process about six times saving each subsequent change. You can also play around with variations of motion blur and gaussian blur, but try to keep it as undramatic as possible!)If you think each variation of the ripple isn't strong enough you can adjust it's strength in the ripple menu.

 

Right, we're done with Photoshop with our seven saved Leia_fag_ pictures saved somewhere sensible like our desk top.

 

Open Image Ready and open all of your Leia_fag pictures up. Grab the first one and in the animation window click the arrow and click New Frame as many times as Leia pictures you made.You'll see duplicates appearing of the first Leia_fag picture. Go to the second Leia picture you made, click the arrow and press Copy frame. Go back to the first Leia picture click the arrow and press Paste frame with the second frame highlighted. You'll see the second picture pasted in. Repeate this process with all your pictures. If you now click play you'll see some simple animation. Yay! It's a bit manic though, as if the smoke is on steroids, so we need to slow the frame speed down. Under each picture frame you'll see it's time; adjust this to 0.2 seconds. We are done.

 

Go to the Optimize Window and use these basic settings:

 

Gif, selective, no dither, lossy:0, 256 colours, gif 128 no dither, and save optimized as Leia_fag. You can preview your gif in your browser to see how it looks btw, and also check out it's file size. As a rule of thumb 200kb should be absolute max for most gifs, multi-megabyte gifs are utterly pointless. Use flash instead. I got mine at 30kb.

 

All done! Make yourself a cup of tea and sit back to admire your gif.

 

http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e253/Jahled/leia_fag.gif

[DarthTofu]

*Bows down in awe* Yes, m'lord... I'll have to use isohunt to get me adobe photoshop, but that shouldn't be too hard... Sounds like a lot of work- is it, or does it just seem that way when its all written down?

 

Also, can you change the rate at which frames change, or would you just put multiples of the same image? For instance, say you have someone say something very stupid and you want everyone to look at him for a bit- if there was a one second lag for each time he spoke, could you now decelerate that for a few frames only so that everyone looks at him for, say, ten seconds?

[Jahled]

*Also, can you change the rate at which frames change, or would you just put multiples of the same image? For instance, say you have someone say something very stupid and you want everyone to look at him for a bit- if there was a one second lag for each time he spoke, could you now decelerate that for a few frames only so that everyone looks at him for, say, ten seconds?

 

Yep! Each frame can have a unique frame-rate.

[DarthTofu]

Okay, then... In the dead of night, isohunt shall find adobe photoshop... Good thing I had a summer course in using it at the school

[Guest Scathane]

Thank you, o Great Giffer! Brillian post, dude!

[Krytos]

Smoking gif Jahled

 

Woo woo to 100 pages of animated gif goodness!!!

[Mad78]

Here is another little animation trick.

 

1. Create a new image in Photoshop

 

2. In the image create a new layer on which you write some text.

 

Transfer the image to imageready.

 

3. in the animation window make sure your pic is selected and click the duplicate button.

 

4. Now select the first one of the pics and make sure the text layer is visible (this can be done in the layer window by seeing the if there is a little eye next to the name of the layer).

 

5. Select the duplicate of your pic and make the text layer invisible by clicking the little eye.

You should now have two pics. One on which the text is visible. One on which it isn't.

 

6. Now, in the animation window, press the Tween button(next to the duplicate button. Add 20 frames and click ok.

 

Play the animation to see your text slowly disappear.