How to get started making gifs and graphics

[juniperjester]

   I love all these little gifs and I see things on others' pages, but I am very new to anything like this! If there are any threads you know of that could help, please link them! Any tips, lmk! Thank you :3 I would greatly like to post some OC work here and be able to promote it using those gifs people seem to be able to attach to their posts and profiles.
I am an amateur coder, so if that's involved please give any advice you can!

EDIT: Thank you all so much for the advice! :D

[goat]

are you wanting to make gifs from a source video?  if so, there's plenty of youtube to gif converters out there. most of them watermark the images though tbf.  anyway i just made this on makeagif.com   



but if you're wanting to make your own gifs from scratch (i.e. web banners, buttons, etc.), then gimp is a very versatile tool to have!  there's a bit of a learning curve involved, but it's nothing too complex.  they do have a good amount of tutorials though!

:3

[Rotting_Heart]

There's a gif text generator on glitter graphics, which could help with making your gifs/ocs funkier.

If you're looking for a more collage type vibe, there's always picmix which you can add your oc in as a background, and overlay gifs on top of them.

If you don't feel like doing that though there's "makesweet" which has premade gifs or messages which you can attach an image to. (You ever see those red heart locket gifs? This is where they come from)

text generator

make sweet

create a picmix

If you're looking for graphics to make gifs specifically, theres a lot of myspace graphic websites archived on the wayback machine. If you're looking for something more modern, people have taken to making graphic archives on strawpage, rentry, tumblr, neocities, and caard.


(oh yeah theres also graphic generators on said myspace graphic sites but idk if they work or not, figured you could find out urself tho)

Hope this helps ^_^

[kringle]

also giving a shout out to ezgifs, i use it to speed gifs up, resize, or combine gifs together or gifs/images. their on-site menu is kind of weird to navigate tho half the time i just use a search engine to search what i want and put ezgifs at the end.

right now my current artistic hurdle for gifs and graphic making is making transparent gifs, since the art software i use isn't able to export transparent gifs unless i upgrade it, if i find a way to auto-compile frames through some website it is OVER for yall

[goat]

gimp is good for making transparent gifs.  if you're working with a non transparant image, you can just go the route of

layer > transparency > add alpha channel (mobile postin rn so not sure if that's correct but im fairly sure that it is)

that adds a transparent layer, and then you just erase the parts you dont want from the source material (e.g. eraser, crop, path select etc)

ill prob throw up a gimp how to for these boards at some point, unless such a thing has already been posted ofc :3

[jack_dawlia]

A random collection of things ive thought of:

I like to use krita when making gifs and graphics :)! Theres a bit of a learning curve with the animation tools but its not too bad, transparency is easy to use as well! It has text tool but they arent pixel-art and for some reason circle dont properly work?? but i still like it

A tip for using krita, when exporting a gif dont do "file > export > (saving as a gif)", instead do "file > render animation > export as video > render as: gif image". and if you want to import a gif, dont open it as you would a regular image, instead do "file > import video animation"
--

If you want to incorporate video clips into your graphics this is how i do it:

• Take your video clip and convert it to a gif using the wonderful ezgif.com
• Resize the video to your needed dimentions
• (optional)Compress the hell out of your gif, mainly with 'Remove Every nth Frame', and youll probably have to change the speed after since removing frames speeds it up. (many times i have been shocked by the file size of a small image since its been left in 60fps :P)
• Import into the art program of your choice and go wild

(i mainly just add borders which can be done in ezgif but i find it easier to just do it in krita)

--
If youre using pixel art in your graphics and want to change the size of them without them getting blurry make sure you use "filter nearest neighbour", not bilinear or anything

Also if you end up using the same borders a lot (like stamp edges or button shadows) its useful to have a folder of them premade so you can slap them on your graphic without having to redraw it ^^! and you can use clipping to easily recolour em.

And for things like button and blinkies remember to zoom out every once in a while so you can see what theyll actually look like on a site, and you can make sure the contrast is great enough that you can read them (also seeing what they look like on another screen if you have one! image look way muted more muted on my laptop screen than phone screen for example).
--
To add gif to the bottom your posts on here is thats what you mean by

using those gifs people seem to be able to attach to their posts and profiles

, then go to "profile (top menu) > settings & profile > my details" then there is the section titled "signature" and you can put

Code

[img width=width height=height]https://mysite.com/my_image.png[/img]

that's everything i could think of, hope any of it's helpful ^_^!