Gif Tutorial Two: Freezing the Background
Now some of you may ask, “Why would I want to freeze the background of my gif?” There are a few reasons. One could be that you only want to isolate the main character in a frame. Also, freezing the background can lower the file size of your gif.
*WARNING: THERE ARE RESTRICTIONS *
Only freeze the background of a gif if there isn’t much movement going on within the gif. The best way I can show you this is by giving you an example. Take the gif I made in my first tutorial.
See how Sherlock is really the only thing moving, and he isn’t even moving that much. This would be the perfect gif to freeze the background.
Now look at this gif:
See how much the camera is moving? This would not be a good gif to freeze the background. Trust me I tried a million times! Now onto the giffing!
Step One: Make your Gif
You would already need to have a knowledge of how to gif to complete this tutorial. Please refer to my “Basic Gif Tutorial” here.
Now go ahead and make your gif. I recommend doing all the coloring before you freeze your background.
Step 2: Freezing the Background
Now that the gif is ready you can freeze the background. The first thing I’m going to do is to place all of my layers into a new group. I will explain why in a second. To do this select all of the layers in the layers window, except for the coloring folder. To select all of the layers click the first layer, hold shift, and then click the last layer. It should look like this:
Now you are going to put the layers into a group. To do this look for the drop down menu in the layers window. Find “New Group From Layers” click it, and then hit okay in the window that will pop up.
Now click the arrow beside the name “Group Two” this will show you all of the layers in the group.
Now you are going to duplicate the first layer. To do this click on the first layer and press Control + J. This will then make a copy of the first layer. You are then going to drag this frame in between the two groups like so:
Now close the second group by pressing the arrow that you clicked to open it. Now you are going to turn off Group 2. To do this just click the eye beside group two.
Now click on your eraser and erase the part of the gif you want to move. I repeat erase the part of the gif you want to move. I will be erasing Sherlock since he is the only thing I want to move.
*The reason that I went through the extra steps to isolate the layer that you are going to erase from is because when you just copy the first layer and erase you can’t see what you are erasing. Does that make sense? By isolating the layer that is going to be erased you can see what you are going to be removing.*
