How to make HD .Gifs

In this day and age, we as human beings need to do all that we can to reduce our carbon footprint and to save this planet from the inevitable doom and destruction of the human race.

Using .gifs for your cheap presentations and .webms for the less crappy works had to be the best mercy you shall bring upon this destitute earth, by not wasting everyone's damn bandwidth with a Youtube or VIMEO video of 10 seconds misery. /s /kappa

What am i even reading here.

But seriously, HD .gifs and .webms are the sweet nectars for our sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet internet. Whether to show off prestige portfolios or posting shit memes. You need to keep the files as small as possible while maximizing the quality of your output.

Here's a comparison:

Garbage

God Tier

I will now show you how to save humanity from yourselves in just a few simple steps!

To begin, HD .gifs works best in short seconds loops (0s 1s 2s 3s 4s and even 5s), it is not advised to spawn an entire 4min music video into a .gif (well you could, but why...)

The difference lies in the export function. Most people just use converters or the .gif function in their favourite video editor, which causes compression problems that can't be controlled, and will usually produce lackluster result.

Here we will be using Photoshop for our .gif exports:

1. Prepare your video with whatever editing software you use, most should have a image sequence export function. .Png is preferred here in case you would like to maintain your alpha layers for effects and transparency in the end result.

artstation.com/artist/ting

Note: Photoshop can also import .mp4, .avi and .mov format files aswell. But for best quality and control, it is best to import image sequences.

2. Open up Photoshop select Import --> Video Frames to Layers, head to the first image from your sequence folder, tick "Image sequece" and hit "Import".

3. At the framerate selection, keep it to your original source.

4. Photoshop has built-in animation functions.
You could access it via Windows --> Timeline. Here finish any touch-ups or by-frame organizing, but most likely you won't have to do anything.

5. Now go to File --> Save for Web, select GIF in the dropdown menu.

6. Depending on your upload destination, some sites might limit max upload size, in this case, use the Lossy slider to adjust your quality control. But since i'm here to show you HD .gifs, we shall set the slider to 0. Quality set to bicubic smoother (what this does is resampling the pixel dimensions, thereby causing a similar anti-aliasing effect. Often this does not affect the size of the export.)

7. Looping Options set to "Forever", let your .gifs suffer in eternity.

You could check the size and framerates to the left of the export panel.

8. Hit Save.

9. Success!