aurora_amethyst: Lucy Pevensie when she first enters Narnia and notices the snow. (Default)
[personal profile] aurora_amethyst
Tutorial #27

Animated Snow

Made in GIMP, fully translatable

Going from this: to this:
or this:

Requested by Frodo B from NW

Open your base. I used a screencap from Home of the Nutty and resized it.



Go ahead and color the way you wish. Then flatten the image.



Open a new transparent layer. Go to Filter>Noise>RGB Noise. Make sure that Independent RGB is checked and Correlated Noise is unchecked. Set red, green, blue, and alpha to 1.00. You should have a bunch of colorful specks all over your image. This will be your snow. Don't worry! It will look like snow later!



Go to Color>Desaturate. Check luminosity, and click okay. Now the snow should be black.



Next, we want the snow to be white. Go to Color>Invert. Now the snow is white! Now, hide that snow layer we just made, and make a new transparent layer. Repeat the previous steps to get snow on the new transparent layer. In order for the snow to move, you can't just duplicate the snow layers because then the snow won't move! Make 3 to 5 of these "snow" layers. I made 4 snow layers. Then make all the snow layers visible.



Now you'll want to duplicate the base layer 3 times. Move each base so that it is paired with a "snow" layer.



Merge down each "snow" layer with each base.



There are several ways to save the animation. It depends on what kind of quality you want.

1. Go to Filter>Animation>Optimize for GIF. A new image will open with the layers optimized. This makes the file size smaller so you can use it on places like LJ. Save it as a GIF. Another box will pop up. Make sure to save it as an animation. Don't save as grayscale either. Another box will pop up. Leave it as is. Make sure the loop forever box is checked. Then click save.

2. The other way is just to save it a GIF without optimizing it. You save it just like you did above.

See the difference? #1 is 44.9 KB. #2 is 50.2 KB.


Optimzed Unoptimized

If you want to use the icon on LJ, you'll probably have to do 2-3 layers of snow rather than 4.

Let me know if you have any questions!





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aurora_amethyst: Lucy Pevensie when she first enters Narnia and notices the snow. (Default)
Amie

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