July 1, 2021 : Gif Making In Adobe

Over the years, I’ve created plenty of animated gif’s for various clients… and maybe a few for personal enjoyment. However, it wasn’t until recently that I did some research on the various ways of making a Gif in Adobe.

I’m working on long-term project, creating 3-second looped gifs of various icons. Below is a collection of some of the first drafts (click on the image to view the gif in all its glorious motion):

There are over a hundred that need to get done, and I have maybe fifteen. I try to crank one out every week or two… did I mention it’s a long-term project?

In the past, my process of creating a Gif was:

  1. Create the animation in After Effects
  2. Render out an mp4 (via Encoder)
  3. Import the mp4 into Photoshop
  4. Export the mp4 as a Gif

I recently found out Encoder renders Gif’s directly. While this reduced the steps, there were issues with the final render. Below is a version using this process:

Obviously the color bleeding/ artifacting was unacceptable. As such, I reverted back to the Photoshop Export. For good measure, I adjusted some of the export settings (most notably increasing the Dither to 100%). Below is the end result:

Chef’s Kiss! This project not only verified the necessary pipeline for creating an acceptable Gif in Adobe, but it forced me to dive deeper in Photoshop’s Gif export Settings… something I hadn’t done before. It’s not often I get a chance to dig into the nuts and bolts of Adobe so this was a fun (and worthwhile) exercise.

posted by Pi Visuals at 11:11 pm

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December 28, 2018 : Gaomon In Practice

Last month, after much procrastination, I decided to purchase a drawing tablet – the Gaomon PD1560. Even though I ordered it shortly after that decision, I didn’t get a chance to use it until a few weeks ago.

When I did finally crack it open, it took a little time to set up and figure out the settings; but for the last few weeks, it was heavily used for some storyboarding. Below is one of the boards:

Overall, I like it a lot. For starters, the tablet is very friendly with Photoshop, which is what I used for the Storyboards. Creating everything digitally from the get go also sped up my process considerably. In the past, if I needed a hand-drawn Board, I would have to draw them by hand, clean up the drawing, then scan it into my computer, and then clean it up digitally. Very tedious.

Being my first drawing tablet, I thought it would take a little time to get used to the sensitivity of digital drawing. However, that did not prove to be the case.

While I don’t have anything planned at the moment, I hope to use the Gaomon again soon. At the very least, I would like to do some recreational drawing on it. It is relaxing, plus it will help me better familiarize myself with Photoshop’s brush capabilities.

posted by Pi Visuals at 9:24 pm

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