#I WOULD AND STILL WOULD DELETE ANY GIFS THAT BOTHER ANY GIFMAKER AT ANY TIME PAST PRESENT OR FUTURE

[tobiasrieper]

hi! sorry if this is a bother but may i ask how you crop / sharpen your gifs? your edits always look so sharp and clean and i can never get mine to look like that!

hiii no bother at all! and tysm!! it actually took me a really really long time to figure out why my gifs weren't as sharp as they could be lol ;_; also i'm not sure how much photoshop knowledge you know, so to be on the safe side, i'll just make this a sort of tutorial under the readmore! not anything super in-depth, and i won't be covering how to actually make gifs

this is what we'll end up with

i think the general process for gifmakers is crop and resize into tumblr dimensions first and then sharpen, otherwise you lose all that sharpness if you downscale afterwards. this is what took me so long to realize LOL the steps actually matter!!

tumblr photos/gifs follow three fixed widths which are 540px, 268px, and 177/178px (in a 3x3 set, the middle gif is 178px). if the widths are any bigger or smaller than these, tumblr will automatically resize for you, which will probably make your gif blurry. so adhering to tumblr dimensions is pretty important if you want your gifs to stay sharp! HERE is a good visual of the dimensions

assuming your source material is 1920x1080p, let's say you want to make it a 540px gif. after importing into photoshop, first step is to go to the menu bar at the top of your photoshop window and go to image > image size. i’ve changed my hotkeys for both image and canvas size just to speed things up a little

image size will resize your whole canvas without losing its original dimensions, but make sure the Constrain Proportions box is checked in the window!

the width box says 1920, so just change that to 540. with constrain proportions on, the height will automatically change to 304. when you hit OK, the gif will be in the correct dimensions and also the same aspect ratio. but that was without cropping. maybe you wanted to make your gif a square, a 540x540px gif instead of 540x304px. you would have to do all your cropping before using image size. it’s always the first thing i do when i start out with a gif!

some people like to use the actual cropping tool (hotkey C i believe is the default), but i like to use canvas size. while your canvas is still 1920x1080, go to image > canvas size and the window will pop up. to make your gif a square, just change the width to be the same size as the height. in this case, the height is 1080. here is what the gif looks like now with its new size

if you need to move the gif, like for example if Parvati here was cut off by the cropping, you can simply use the move tool and reposition her. using canvas size won’t delete cropped off edges

since we’ve cropped our gif to how we want it, now we can resize to 540 using image size. all that’s left is to sharpen! my smart sharpen settings are amount: 500; radius: 0.3px; remove: gaussian blur

this is our end result!

and that's it! the steps are crop > resize > sharpen. sorry if some (or a lot) of this didn't make sense, but i hope this helped! my askbox and messages are always open if there are any questions. good luck!! 💖💖