Okay, let me start off by saying I am crap at tutorials and this will probably be too detailed and confusing, and I’m sure there are much easier ways to do this but people are asking, so bear with me!

I USE PHOTOSHOP CS5

tips:

-always have your animation window, your history, and your layers windows open.

-make sure the gifs you are using have the same number of frames. Most of mine have 15.

Step 1. Open up a new canvas. I always make mine 500px in width. Length is up to you. Generally I like to color the background black just to have a blank dark canvas. (you can color it however you want, and can always change it later.)

Your screen should look similar to this (I forgot to have the animation window open, you should have it open.)

Step 2. Open up the premade gifs you would like to use. (To see how to make a basic gif, see my tutorial here)

I am going to use these two:

Your screen should now look similar to this;

Step 3. Select all frames of the first gif you would like to place on the canvas and click the arrow (highlighted below in red) and hit ‘copy frames’

Step 4. Go to your main canvas. Down on the animation menu, hit the arrow again, but this time ‘paste frames.’ Now, when you do this a box will pop up. You want to make sure you’ve selected the ‘paste over selection’ option.

Step 5. Repeat this copy/paste action with the second gif you are using. Make sure you still have all frames of the first gif on the canvas selected before pasting the second gif over it or it will not order correctly.

Step 6. Move the second gif down so we can see what we are working with. Do this by selecting the layers of the second gif in the LAYERS panel, and moving the gif down by using the move tool.

Your screen should now look similar to this;

As you can (maybe) see, the black of the canvas is only showing on the first frame of the gifs in the animation bar. We need to make sure every frame has a background behind it. Just click on each frame one by one and hit the eyeball on the layers panel for the background layer.

Before: eyeball is unchecked

After: eyeball is checked (highlighted in red)

repeat this checking process for each frame.

Step 7. Resize your gifs by selecting their layers in the layers window AND the animation panel and ctrl+t to resize/move the image around the canvas. ONLY select the layers that belong to each individual gif, not the second gif layers or the background layer.

My image now looks like this;

Okay, so I know this is getting tedious, but were almost done. I’m not gonna mess around with the image much since it’s just a tutorial, but now we can add text/background textures etc to the entire thing. :]

Step 8. I am going to use this texture from two percent textures as my backdrop.You need to copy or save the background texture you want (you can find tons of textures in lots of places.) Now paste the texture image on top of the background layer. In my case it’s not fitting the whole size of the original canvas but w/e its just a tutorial lol.

You should now look similar to this;

Mess around with the layer style settings and opacity levels to get the desired effect. I’m going to set it to ‘screen’ at an opacity of 20%

Now my image looks like this;

I know it’s crappy, just deal, lolol.

Go ahead and mess with the curves/color balance/whatever else you want on the texture layer.

IF YOU DO NOT WANT A TEXTURE AS A BACKGROUND AND WANT A SOLID COLOR; skip the above step and simply use the paint can to change the color of your background layer.

Step 9. Adding text and top texture(s)

To add text to your image, just make sure you have only frame 1 of your image selcted in the animation window, and that you are on the topmost layer in the layer panel.

Select the text tool, and add your text! Change the color/font etc around as much as you want. I lowered the opacity a bit on mine as well.

You should now look like this;

Now I’m going to add a colorful top layer to finish it off. I’ll use this texture, which is also from the site I mentioned before.

Just copy the image the same way as before and paste it on TOP of all of your layers. I set the layer to ‘vivid light’ at 30% opacity. (I know it says normal/7%, just ignore that.)

Step 10. Yay! We are finished. Now just save your image the way you normally would for a gif (File-save for web and devices)

The final gif looks like this:

It’s not the most put together, but hopefully you guys get the basics. It’s not as hard as it seems once you get the hang of it. Keep checking back for more tutorials!

Enjoy xx

-Sioned