Well, er… DIFFICULT QUESTION IF DIFFICULT.

Everyone uses different techniques to do this so be warned that the following instructions is how I do gifs and not necessarily how everyone else does it.

TO GET CAPS:

• VLC player is your hero. Get it.
• Open VLC player and go to ‘Tools’
• Click on ‘Preferences’
   
• Go to ‘Hotkeys’ 
   
• Scroll down until you get to ‘Take video snapshot’
   
• Customize to your liking
• Go ‘Video’
   
• Scroll down until you get to ‘Video snapshoots’
   
• Customize to your liking
• And there you go! You’re ready to cap! 

THE ‘GIF’ PART

• Get Photoshop
• Go to ‘Windows’ and select ‘Animation’
   
• Leave the ‘Windows’ setting and change your settings to ‘Frames’
  
  Click that button us that this  now looks like 
• Now you can start giffing!
• You now need to load those caps you made into Photoshop
• To do this, go to ‘File’ and then ‘Scripts’
   
• Now go to ‘Load Files Into Stack…’
   
• Which will take you here:
   
• Click on browse
   
• Now go find your caps and load them in.
   
• Once they have all loaded in go here:
   
• Click on ‘Make Frames From Layers’
   
• They will all load in backwards so now go back here:
   
• And go to ‘Select All Frames’ (just to be safe)
   
• And then click ‘Reverse Frames’
   
• Now your caps aren’t in backwards! YAY!
• If you play your gif now-
  -the gif will be going to fast
• So go ‘Select All Frames’ once more and then click here
   
  (any of the 0 sec’s things will do) 
• At this point, I tend to change the setting to 0.2 because that setting tends to make the gif run the smoothest
   
• Just to be safe though, play your gif through. Does it flow the way you want to? Adjust the settings again by going to ‘Other’ to tweek the speed.
   
• You’ll want to now start colouring and lighting your gif
• To do all the adjustments you wish to make go here:
   
• There you will find a list of options. I tend to only use:
  
  but you can use any of those settings, adjusting until the image starts to look like you want it to. 
• You can make further adjustments using ‘Opacity’
   
• You can also change the settings
  
  to your liking. I tend to only use ‘Soft Light’, ‘Overlay’, and (on very rare occasions) ‘Hard Light’
• Once the gif is beginning to look like you want it to, go to ‘Image’
   
• From here you can either go to ‘Image Size’ or ‘Canvas Size’
• ‘Image Size’ allows to your shrink the image down to the size you want it to be (width: 500 is normal Tumblr size)
   
• ‘Canvas Size’ allows you to crop, cutting the image to the size you want it to be. 
• In ‘Canvas Size’, if you wish to only crop, for example, the top side of your image simply do this:
  
  
• Now look at your gif. How many frames do you have? If you’re over nine frames, the gif will most likely be over the Tumblr limit. 
• TO CHECK THE SIZE OF YOUR GIF, go to ‘File’ and then ‘Save Web & Devices…’
  
• To see the size of you gif, look here:
  
  556.6K! WAY over the Tumblr limit.
• To get your gif size down you can:
          - Delete every second frame (sometimes this doesn’t work with gifs and makes them to jolty looking so ALWAYS check your gif after you’ve done this)
          - Make your gif black and white.
  
  This will most likely mean you will have to recolour your gif.
          - Continue using ‘Canvas Size’ to make your gif smaller
          - Freeze the background (which I will make a tutorial for at a later date) 
           - Try darkening your gif with gradients (you will most likely have to change the lighting of your gif after this)
• Once you have done this, go to ‘Save Web & Devices…’ again and see if you’ve gotten the size down.
  YAY! IT’S UNDER!
• However, if your gif is still over, you can alter the following settings to get it down.
   
• Hopefully by now your gif is below 500K (don’t try to get to your to just 500K because, in loading, it might be that one point something on it that will make it not work on Tumblr. Get it down to at least 490K if you can.)
• Now make sure that your settings say ‘GIF’
   
• Make sure that your settings also have your looping going on ‘Forever’
   
• NOW CLICK ‘SAVE’

TADA!

YOU HAVE JUST MADE A GIF.