aw thank you anon - both for the kind words and the eid mubarak :)
so I taught myself photoshop and the first bit of advice I would give is to let yourself be bad at it. I deffo think that is easier said than done esp if you're a perfectionist, but you're going to start out with basic things and you're not always going to get it right. and that's fine because ultimately gifmaking is for fun. for me, anyway, it helps keep me sane, lol, so if there are imperfections in my gifs - which there often are - I don't mind so much. I look back on a lot of my earliest gifs and I just hate them. the colouring, the text, the everything basically. it's so bad. but giffing is something that gets better with practice I think.
I've made a couple giffing tutorials here and here but I reckon you'd need to learn the basics before you can start thinking about selective colouring and sharpening and other things like that.
another tip would be to try and download high quality versions of whatever you're giffing. I'd say at a minimum you need 720p but ideally 1080p because it really makes a difference to your gifs' quality.
logos and watermarks - for the love of god, try to crop those out if you can. I'd much rather see less of a character's head if it means I don't have to see an ugly watermark that can ruin a gif. especially if you then add text on top of that.
if you have poc in your gifs, or even if you don't, just be aware that shows can often wash out characters' skin tones etc. you also don't want white characters to be too pink, lol.
when giffing, if you have any sort of "night light" (yknow the setting that reduces blue light to prevent eye strain) on, make sure to turn it off before you start colouring, as that will affect what your gifs look like to everyone.
I'd say start off with making gifs and focus on how to colour them properly, before you start making gifs with text. when you do make gifs with text, feel free to play around with different fonts - there are loads of free font websites on google you can use.
if you want, you can use something like trello or even a word or google doc to keep track of all your giffing ideas, and try to match the scene to the lyric or poem or whatever quote you're using, if it's that kind of text gifset. and of course remember to proofread the text on your gifs and on your captions.
I'm sure there are lots of photoshop tutorials out there for beginners. am not sure where to direct you for those as I mostly learned it by ear, and it was probably over eight years ago that I started messing around with photoshop myself. but I wish you luck, anon, and am flattered that my gifs made you want to start!
