GIF Brewery

Creating Better GIFs Reblogs Everywhere!

This tutorial is collection of tips & tricks on creating better GIFs. These tips are posted more frequently on our tumblr, but this should be a good repository for the best ones.

Also, if you'd like to learn more about what determines the size of a GIF, read our recent post on it.

Fitting In On Tumblr

There are two rules for GIFs on Tumblr:

  1. The width must be less than 500px.
  2. The file size must be less than 1 MB.

So, obviously, the first rule is easy to meet. Simply resize the video in GIF Brewery. The second, however, can be trickier. Basically you have three options:

  1. Decrease the frame size further.
  2. Decrease the number of frames.
  3. Decrease the number of colors.

Adjusting The Number of Colors

Decreasing the number of colors is easy in GIF Brewery 2.3. You simply need to turn on "Reduce the number of colors in GIF" option and switch to "Adaptive Palette". This option chooses the best colors based on your video.

Note Choosing the best colors isn't fast, so GIF creation will take a noticable amount of more time.

Removing Color Banding

If you've created GIFs in GIF Brewery, you've probably noticed color banding before. Below is a single still from a GIF that shows the issue in the sky.

So, how can we eliminate the banding? The first choice is to enable GIF Brewery's custom color palettes. This allows you to use dithering. There are multiple dithering algorithms available to you. You should check them out individually as they each have their own advantages & disadvantages which is largely based on the current video. Also, a custom color palette & dithering gives you the benefit of decreasing the file size.

The second choice is to use one of GIF Brewery's filters. In particular, use Filter > Halftone > CMYK Halftone.... You'll want to play around with the GCR & UCR to get the colors you want.

The downside of the CMYK Halftone method is that it can considerably increase the file size of the GIF. Here's an example of using the CMYK Halftone filter.

However, if we combine both dithering & CMYK Halftone, we can get pretty decent results!

The video used above is Kayley Ashworth - Superstar bmx EDIT from JC Pieri.

Happy GIF Brewing!