HackMD
GIF Overlay
╰(´︶`)╯Oki!! Hi hello!! I’m here to give an easy, descriptive, picture filled tutorial!! Once you figure things out, this process is super easy, you'll fly through it!
What you'll need:
- Basic Photoshop Knowledge (as long as you know how to make gifs, and you understand the properties that gifs hold (their size, the colouring, etc.) you'll be fine)
Tutorial
STEP ONE: Make The GIFs
Create or source all the GIFs and backgrounds that you're going to be using.
SIDE NOTE: Just a reminder that gif sizes are very specific on Tumblr. You can't exceed a 2.99mb limit so, when you're putting multiple gifs together, or when you're laying it overtop an image, just remember that the size will only increase. (ˊ̥̥̥̥̥ ³ ˋ̥̥̥̥̥)
STEP TWO: Applying A GIF Overlay
First thing you should do, once you have your gif made, is to open up everything you need in Photoshop.
Then, going to your gif, you want to go to your timeline menu, and selecting the three little lines, you'll chose the option Select All Frames. If you don't want every frame, and only a few of them, highlight the ones you want by clicking on the first frame, then holding shift and clicking on the last desired frame.
Now, going back to the three little lines, you're going to select the option Copy Frames.
Now, head over to your background layer. When you go to the timeline menu now, the option to Paste Frames should be available.
When you click it, you should get a little dialogue box that looks like this:
Select the option Paste over Selection and then click OK.
You'll notice that your timeline probably looks like this:
The background image is only appearing on the first layer, and none of the other ones. To remedy this, copy everything that's in your background layer, and duplicate it by hitting 'CTRL+J.' This will duplicate everything in the same place. You can now, either delete or hide the original layers after putting them into a folder.
SIDE NOTE: If it's easier for you, I'd also recommmend putting all the frames of the gif into a folder. This way your layers panel is cleaner and easier to look at, and you're less likely to grab something you don't mean to! To do this, just highlight all the frames of the gif from the LAYERS PANEL, and then click the folder icon at the bottom of the layers panel. ☆ヾ(*´・∀・)ﾉ
Moving on, now you can move the gif around, resize it how you want, play with the opacity, etc. Make sure whenever you're selecting your gif that you're selecting ALL the frames. Otherwise, you'll only end up moving 1 frame thats in the stack, and things will get really frustrating to fix. Do this by selecting all the frames of the gif from the layers panel.
SIDE NOTE: Make sure the dimensions of your background are already the size that you want it to be. Resizing the whole thing once the gif is added can be really hectic and frustrating, so try to do this before you place the gif in!
STEP THREE: Exporting The GIF
And that's pretty much it! Now you can save it for the web as you normally would. （ﾉ｡≧◇≦）ﾉ Go to 'File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy)' OR hit CRTL+ALT+SHIFT+S on your keyboard. Either way, you export the whole thing as a gif, and save it! Now you can put it up on Tumblr, or make a header, or anything you want to do with this technique!
A header I made. This one is multiple gifs in one, rather than overlay, but it's pretty much the same process!
From a GFX I made. This one is more of an overlay, where I've dimmed down the opacity.
(❁´▽`❁)✲ﾟ
And, you've done it! Congrats! It's really simple once you get the hang of it! You can now easily do a gif overlay, or put multiple gifs into one! (For putting multiple gifs into one, there's a few more steps so if you have any questions let me know!) I hope that this tutorial was in depth, spelled correctly and made sense grammatically, and explained everything well! If you have any questions at all or you didn't understand something, just send me a message and I'd love to help you out! MWAH! ٩(•̤̀ᵕ•̤́๑)ᵎᵎᵎᵎ
