#if the process doesnt lead up to anything 'quality' it doesnt bother me

[possiblytracker]

10?

10: What’s that one thing that inspired you to make drawing your consistant hobby?

I grew up drawing and painting a fair amount bc I have one grandparent who is a painter and used to let me and my siblings use his art supplies when we came to stay :) but honestly drawing only became a Regular hobby in primary school when people actually started complimenting me on my shitty doodles of dragons and i just went oh ok this is part of my personality now. and I never looked back

mostly art for me has always been an outlet for "i have too many thoughts in my brain and too little else to do", it has just always been there for me as both an ADHD coping skill and a social crutch even when i don't have the energy or time or focus to do something big and fancy with it. i'm pretty sure it'll Stay a hobby for as long as i can still hold a pen

[eventually--darling]

How do you make gifs? Care to share your process? o3o

oooh yes i can!!! i tried not to get too detailed with it since im interpreting this as just asking for my process rather than an actual tutorial sudhf.

the general tools i use are photoshop (i pay $10 a month T_T), vlc media player, and one of my various video downloading sites. i don't torrent or anything bc that scares me and i dont understand it. plus, since i almost exclusively gif kdramas the video uploads are generally in pretty decent quality and dont get scrubbed from the web the way western shows do.

so once i have the video downloaded i open it with vlc media player. I use a really inefficient method to extract frames but it works well enough that i don't really care to change it. plus i cant really figure out another way? they say that certain video programs can capture frames for you but none of the ones ive tried seem to have that feature. there's also supposedly another method to do it in vlc media player but it's never worked for me. anyway.

so to extract frames in vlc i find the moment i want to capture and then use the "e" hotkey to skip to the next frame and click the little screenshot button to capture it.

i do this over and over at lightning speed until I get all the frames i want. yes this does often lead to accidentally skipping frames (which can make the gif a little choppy) so sometimes i redo it, but sometimes i don't bother.

after i've captured the frames, i copy them from my pictures folder (not entirely sure why they end up there but im not going to mess with the pathway) to a specific folder ive created for that gif or gifset.

then I'll go through and make sure there are no duplicate or missing frames. after that, i edit them down to about 70 frames per gif, then select them all and rename them so that they're in numbered order (photoshop loads them out of order if i don't).

I do 70 frames mostly bc my sharpening action on photoshop doesnt go past 70 frames and i haven't bothered to fix it lol. also it's comfortable length for a gif so there's not much reason to. you can usually get away with about 40-50 frames tho before it feels too short.

ok nowww i open photoshop and things get good.

first thing i do is load the files into a stack.

i have a bunch of settings in place to make life easier so i already have my sharpening action created (which sharpens all the frames for me rather than having to do it manually. gift from God), and my timeline visible. so now i just play my sharpening action

then load the frames into an animation and reverse them so they dont play backwards.

then i set the frame delay to 0.05 seconds. it's interesting bc gifs played at normal speed look kinda weird. so having it slowed down a little is ideal. not too much though or it looks choppy.

now i crop the gif. i dont have to do this here but generally i do. just helps me focus without the distraction of the tv bars on the top and bottom and just. All the other stuff going on in the background.

nowwww i color. usually start with a color adjustment curve layer. when you use the little eyedrop tool this can really deepen the image and bring it to life. you dont realize how dull tv looks until you gif lol.

that gives me the base tones i want and deepens the image.

sometimes i brighten the gif with the curves layer, but in this case adding a separate brightening layer worked better.

then i'll export the gif with tumblr dimensions and upload it into a draft.

if it is still too dark or the colors look off, i'll just mess more with the layers. in this case, i only needed the two, but a lot of gifs will need a few different adjustment layers like vibrance or selective color to look right.

And that's kinda it!

colored:

uncolored:

hopefully it makes sense lol. Like I said, im not thinking of this as a tutorial or anything but i still want ppl to know what im talking about uhsfusd

[gunnerpalace]

I belonged to another heated (but no longer debatable imho) ship were I've known a lot to be IH. And ofc I feel bad they have to bear witness to people so salty about the ending and hated Ino. I hate Ino too with burning passion, and that kinda made me feel guilty. But the psychology major in me was baffled as to how they conclude immediately w/ no analysis she was hated not only because of ships but because either she was written terribly, or she was written to be terrible. Or probably both.

Why cant Ichigo and Rukia be married to someone we could *infer* (because duh it’s not canon they will argue) they are in love with? Someone they have shown to share bond with? “Oh well, its becoming commonplace that the hero doesnt end up w/ main heroine, it’s revolutionary!” Bullshit. Sadly that is logic fallacy you dumbasses. Where’s the progress? Kubo tried, barely even. And again, it’s not even about the ships, its the entire work that has become an anomaly–Bleach as became Bleauuughch.

Again, I feel bad they have to bear the weight of evert criticism, the insult, and the salt of basically a majority of bleach fandom. But I hope they can tell that majority (like 99.99999999998%) of the criticisms are valid and not just hate. If they couldnt bear to actual do analysis of why people hated it, then dont bother plead or guilt trip or go to ppl inboxes why should we just move on. Well, majority already did that’s why all was left were ppl who couldnt be bothered with actual quality.

Here’s the ugly truth about people: they can’t read.

Or they don’t want to.

We have this holdover idea from the Enlightenment that if you can gather enough evidence in fine and exacting enough detail, that you can not only discern some kind of truth, but convince other people of it through the preponderance of evidence. And we have structured our society around that idea, from politics to law to science to academia in general.

The trouble is that that idea is bullshit outside of academia.

That is not at all how regular people approach the world.

And the more we rely upon an idea that people are rational, the more we will be lost at and disappointed by the actuality that people are irrational and emotional.

Consider climate change. The scientific community has had roughly 97% consensus that climate change is being anthropomorphically driven (that is to say, somewhere between overwhelmingly and entirely caused by human activity) since at least the very early 2000s, if not back much earlier. Indeed, we know that the oil companies were aware of it at least as early as 1981! And here we are in 2020, with some 31% of the population either unsure of or disbelieving in it.

Whenever the matter is debated politically, scientists will trot out their facts and drop them on the table and point. The facts are self-evident, they feel. And then the conservative politicians will shrug and say, “I don’t believe you.”

And the scientists have no idea what to do about that. Because to their minds, facts are indisputable. You cannot argue with them.

But you can, as the conservatives illustrate. You just choose not to believe in them.

We are witnessing something very similar with COVID-19 at the moment, with large swathes of the (American) population simply not believing it to be a threat, in spite of all available evidence to the contrary.

We see the same thing with political leadership debating the question of whether to prioritize health or economics, and our media treating this as if it is a legitimate policy debate, when we already know the answer to that question from the Spanish Flu of 1918: towns and cities that were locked down and quarantined suffered fewer casualties and had much faster economic rebounds.

People generally do not read.

People generally do not process.

People generally do not analyze.

People generally do not learn.

And if they can’t do those things for very large-scale existential threats that can threaten anything from tens to hundreds of millions of people worldwide, to the entire ecosphere of the planet, why would one expect them do so for a piece of fiction?

If people cannot handle cold, hard statistical facts, or simple arithmetic, then they certainly cannot handle something as “subjective” as facial expressions or dialogue. I have written recently about how the attitude toward non-fandom things (e.g., politics) increasingly resembles that of fandom, of approaching everything as though it is merely an aesthetic exercise.

That is really what we are dealing with here: ignorance. And not merely ordinary ignorance, not even willful ignorance, but an ignorance so deliberate and cultivated that its goal is nothing less than the total erasure of the facts. (The problem here, in this particular example, are of course the people who say unequivocally, “Ichigo always loved Orihime,” in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Someone who says, “It is clear to me this wasn’t a thing, but I like IH aesthetically,” is a non-issue.)

(Demanding or trying to force this former perspective does, as you suggest in the third ask, indicate a certain insecurity and a tacit admission that the perspective being advanced is illegitimate or poorly substantiated. However, for the people so enthralled to openly admit that is a psychological admission of defeat so severe that most would literally rather die than own up to being wrong to such an extent, and to suffer the attendant internal loss of face. So they seek continual external validation of it to shore it up.)

There is, in essence, no point in communicating with this kind of fan whatsoever. They are functionally like how Kyle Resse describes the Terminator in The Terminator:

Listen, and understand! That Terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear! And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!

There is a lot of tepid discussion out there in political circles that the degree of polarization in society today is unprecedented and that a way to bridge that gap could be through shared interests and values. But in my opinion, fandom proves exactly the opposite is true: the reasons people like things that are nominally “shared interests,” and their view of those things and why they are good, are completely and utterly irreconcilable. There is, essentially, virtually zero overlap in a Venn diagram of the perspectives. Shared interests divide as much as they will ever unite.

In that regard, Bleach should be treated as both a warning and a grim assessment of our world as a whole. It is not really an aberration.

It is the future.

This community (among others) has simply been living in it a few years in advance of other people. Everyone else has gotten their first big taste of it with Trump. (The Republicans have been constructing an alternate reality since 1964, but comparatively few people were aware of how deep the rabbit hole went.)

In my estimation, it is not worth engaging with people over a shared interest with sincerity, let alone in good faith, unless you have done some degree of vetting of their perspective. Most likely observing them or their works for a time. Without that, you simply open yourself up to these people who show a total lack of discernment or rationality.

And that is a large part of why social media is such an absolute garbage fire, because as platforms they are built around precisely the opposite notion. (And largely in defiance of the idea that people might want to curate their experiences or might not want to have “healthy debate,” which is almost never healthy and seldom ever debate). Some would argue this leads to echo chambers and hug boxes, but it’s not like the alternative that these companies have produced (for profit, of course, rather than for of any ideological mission) is any better.

To boil it all down, what we are really forced to rely on (quite sadly) is a free market approach: no matter how much that side rages and waves their “canon” status around, they simply do not produce much content. They will starve long before our side does, regardless of any other factors. (Their “canon” status did not help them any in the past four years.) And the people who are agnostic (e.g., the “I’m Still Bleach” crowd that is for some reason vaguely invested in the series as a whole) will lose interest and move on to the next shiny thing.

The only thing that is necessary in the face of all this is really patience. In the meantime, the best thing is simply to ignore the existence of such parties utterly.

[pjihoon]

Hi~~ I'm really sorry to bother you! But I saw your gifs in my dash and they're so pretty! I don't even stan wanna one but I just went through your gif tag for so long cause they're so nice 😍 Would you ever share your sharpen / action / topaz or coloring settings or tips? 😊

ahh omg anon thank you so much for your kind words! you’re so sweet

i think i’ll just share generic tips! From each stage of the giffing process. i still have so much i can improve with in giffing, so i’m sorry if i give you super wrong advice ahhh but i hope this helps a little?it got super long so it’s under the read more!!

Downloading Videos

make sure it’s the highest quality video you can get. 1080p is your friend. ok honestly, when i’ve giffed, i havent really noticed a difference in quality between 2k/4k and 1080p? maybe im doing it wrong but honestly the only thing ive noticed is that 2k/4k just slows down my computer drastically and takes up way too much space on a computer that already has like zero space to begin with. so i tend to stick with 1080p. 

Also! if you can get 60fps, thats also nice bc it helps your gifs look smoother.

yaknow how i said 1080p is your friend? well ts files are your best friends/family. if you can torrent them or download the, your gifs will look super pretty. i highly recommend this for live performance gifs. you can find ts files for a lot of shows, but again, since my computer has

kpop24hrs and kpopexciting are two places i go for those live perf ts files! kpop24hrs tends to have more i feel (it’s where i go when i want to gif my rookie groups that dont have too much attention on them)

you can also find torrents on twitter, if you search the right things

Extracting Videos

ok for this, if you have a pc (so like not a mac) i HIGHLY recommend looking into avisynth. there’s this tumblr account named brandinator who i’ve heard gives really awesome tips for avisynth and made it really easy for people to get avisnyth.if youre like me and your stuck with a mac, or if you just want to stick with photoshop then you can read the rest of this

i have photoshop cs5? so my tips are generally based around that. 

for youtube videos (so basically mp4/avi format) i use photoshop’s video extraction feature. file—>import–>video frames to layersif your photoshop is like mine for whatever reason and it doesnt want to recognize mp4 files, then what i do is changed the .mp4 extension to a .avi extension (and its super easy to do on mac….i dont have a pc so idk how different that is) the quality doesnt really change either with that simple changing of the ending it sorta just tricks photoshop i guess lol idunno

when youre on the ‘video frames to layers’ window, make sure you don’t hit the ‘limit to every _____ frames’ bc that makes it lose the smoothness quality of gifs. maybe back when the gif limit was like 1mb that would have been important, but we live in a world of luxury now. so for smoother looking gifs, make sure that box is unchecked. other ppl (pc users i think) tend to use other video extraction softwares. i cant remember the name, but all i remember is that for macs, that software cant extract frames so its useless for us. i think it was kmplayer? not sure. like you can download kmplayer on mac but it doesnt have the same features rip.for ts files, i use vlc player (since ps can’t open it) and sit there and capture each and every frame lol. 

Actually Giffing

here’s where things get a bit interpretive

(im assuming you know how to make a gif since you’ve asked for specific things like sharpening and stuff)

for coloring, 

ive found that not changing the lighting too much of the video youre giffing leads to higher quality stuff…but i also hate not changing the lighting too much which is why a lot of my gifs turn out grainy hahah (my coloring is really centered around how to make the person in the gifs look the most ‘natural’? so that usually involves trying to take out video filters). but yea the gifs in which i didnt change too much with coloring, tended to be my most high quality gifs. 

i don’t use other peoples psds and make my own everytime for each gif, and i only usually just adjust ‘curves’ and ‘exposure’ yea.

if there’s an ugly color background that you want to make look more white, when youre in ‘curve’s, go to each color (red green and blue) and drag the little line thing in the top right corner a little to the left. idk what is actually happening there and why it only really addresses the bg but thats a good way to try to make your bg whiter without actually whitewashing the gif. 

for sharpening

lol sharpening, my enemy. its what i struggle with the most

i use .4 at 500% for smart sharpen

and then for topaz i make sure clean color is at 0 first of all, and i mess around with ‘overall strength’ and ‘reduce blur’ until i get the quality that i wanted. i nvr go higher than .07 strength. 

but an important thing for sharpening i think is deciding when you want to crop the picture? do you crop it before or after the sharpening/topaz? i dunno honestly, but for me ive found that cropping first, and then applying sharpening settings leads to the highest quality (or maybe thats what im used to so it turns out better). 

oh yea i dont resize, i crop instead. i’m not sure if that does anything but when i was first starting i found that resizing made my gifs look more blurry…? and that cropping was nicer to my gifs? i’m not sure if that does anything though lol maybe cropping is worse who knows, but its something ive stuck with ever since ive started

save settings

i’ve recently switched over to diffusion! but sometimes that doenst work out so i use the pattern one. i play around with adaptive/selective to see which one looks better or takes up less space haha

last but not least: pray

i spend a lot of my time praying that my gif will come out good haha bc even if you think you did everything right, once you hit that ‘save for web’ button, it’ll look like the ugliest thing in the world it’s really frustrating. like even when i make a gifset from the same video using the same everything (coloring, sharpening, save settings) one gif will look like trash and the other one will be like the best thing ive ever giffed so its like?? pray