i have the darkness.

How to make an overlaying (well, lightened in this case BUT WHATEVER) gif

[x]

Like this one

Disclaimer: There are probably better ways to go around making something like this, but this is how I make my gifs like this. (Also, thank you! :) )

The first thing that you want to know is that you should pick scenes that have the same colors in them and what not when you’re first starting out, in my opinion it’s much harder to do the above gif when you have a gif thats high on lets say yellow and another gif that has a lot of blues.

So yeah, try to keep the colors similar when first starting off.

So now onto the actual tutorial, I’m going to assume that you know how to make a standard gif, make the background gif and sharpen it, then save it, I prefer to color the gifs when they are on the same canvas, and not separately (the coloring I did with the above gif’s would look WONKY if I colored them separately.

So you should have soemthing like this, (of course depending on the size of your gif and the scene and your sharpening settings it will be different, but you get the idea)

Now you are going to want to make the gif that is going to go over this one. To get the measurements I like to crop the original gif where I want to put the second one to get the rough estimate.

then you go to

Image > image size, then write down the height and width then use control + z to get back to the original size.

Now you want to make your second gif using the size that you wrote down before, NOTE: These gifs have to be the SAME amount of frames, or one of them can be HALF the amount if it’s an even number, I’ll explain that later. You should have something like this (like I said, I prefer to color at the end, you can color both gifs separately but I DON’T USUALLY)

Now that you have both gifs saved, go to

File > Import > Video frames to Layers

Then go to where you saved your gifs, they won’t be there BUT you put an (*) in the File Name box and hit enter, they will be there, then open them both.

Make a new canvas 245 x 245 (or however big your background gif is) and you will have this

So now you’re going to put the background gif on first, select all the frames and then go to

then go to the blank canvas, and hit PASTE frames, then select replace frames (ONLY FOR THE FIRST ONE), you are then goign to do the same for the second gif, only you are goign to paste OVER frames instead of REPLACE (ALL of the frames must be selected before you paste!). NOTE: If you did what I mentioned above about half the frames, you are going to selected the first half of the frames on the background gif, then paste the gif over that, then you are goign to select the LAST half and paste it over again. The downside to this is that gif will play twice in the time it takes the first one to play once, but sometimes you have to ~sacrifice~.

You should have THIS

Now you are going to want to place the smaller gif into a group by clicking the folder icon and selecting all the layers of the smaller gif and dragging them ONTO the folder that was created, they should be inside the folder like this

now you are goign to select all the FRAMES (in the animation bar!)

and use the move tool (v) to move the group to where you want it, you should have THIS!

now the measurements i took in the beginning where a little too big but thats OKAY! move the gif around until it looks good then select the group and set it to lighten (thats what works for this gif (and almost all of the gifs I’ve made, play around with screen/overlay and the other settings if it doesnt look good for you!)

and you should have THIS

NOW COLOR!

now you can SEE parts of the gif you don’t want to see, you can see the lines and it just doesn’t look BLENDED, you know? so now you want to select the group again and use a LAYER MASK , there are a few tutorials around abotu how to use the layor mask but the main gist of it is that you want to select the paint brush tool, set the hardness to 0% and make sure that THIS is selected