#if anyone else has some better links/tutorials for free software (or photoshop too) feel free to add to this to help out this anon!

[guardian-angle22]

Hi, I was wondering if you could help me. I really want to start making my own gifs but I can't figure out if there's a way to do it without paying for some kind of app. I love your gifs and I was wondering if you could tell me how you make your gifs. Also, do you use a screen recording app?

Thank you for liking my gifs, first off, that’s very nice to hear! 💜

I personally do pay monthly for Adobe Creative Cloud and use Photoshop to make my gifs. I’m not familiar with how to use other free programs/sites that people use to make gifs from, but I do know it's fully possible to have amazing gifs made from them. Here's two posts I've seen that talk about using those free software: here and here.

I taught myself how to make gifs via a variety of random gif tutorials here on tumblr that I found by google searching. I wish I could tell you there was one easy tutorial I followed and just immediately could make them, but I really pieced things together from a bunch of different ones and then used trial and error to figure out the basics. I think this blog may have been one I used as reference, but it's been about a year so I couldn't be 100% sure. I will say that once I did figure out the basics, the blog @clubgif has been a really helpful resource for trying out different experimental things on top of that. It's been awhile since I've done anything like that (just because of time and real life), but my 911 Lone Star Enneagram series came as a result of wanting to try out different font effects I saw through different posts on there.

As far as screen recording goes - I do use screen recording just on my laptop (by using Windows+ALT+R) on occasion for things outside of 911LS episodes. For example, this Brian podcast set and this Ronen set were from screen records. 99% of the gifs I make from the episodes though are done from downloads of the episodes. I've been downloading them from this folder that @3416 is fucking amazing for uploading the episodes to. The gif quality will depend on how good the video quality is that you get the frames from, so screen recording is never the best tbh, but sometimes it's the easiest or only option.

I hope this helps at least a little bit. If you really want to learn to make them, I say go for it! Mess around with some of the free software and see how you feel about it. But also don't expect your gifs to immediately look perfect. This is one of the first gifs I ever made:

compared to one I just made recently:

I hope think you can tell that there was improvement between the two. Just be patient with yourself and don't be afraid to post things!