Help with animam ted gif

[snafubaby]

I took about four photos of something in .jpg format. The photos have a white background. I renamed them photo001 all the way to photo004. I ran them in virtualdub, and made an .avi file. I then tried ro make an animated gif in virtualdub, and succeeded. The only problem is, the animated .gif has a white background. Is there a way to change the color of the background, to like a yellow? Would it be difficult?

[poisondeathray]

Is there any other white in the picture other than the background? If not, you can do it with something like vegas , after effects easily where you can selectively color correct . If there is other white, then you need to provide more information, maybe post a sample there are other methods

[snafubaby]

hi. The only white is the background. Is After Effects expensive? Are there any other software titles i can use, maybe even a trial version of something, just to see if it would work? I have no problem spending money on a good piece of software to make it look good.

Here is the gif in question. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[poisondeathray]

But there is other white - look at the highlights , reflections on the shoe tip for example

The problem is if tell the program to change "white " to "yellow", those overlapped white areas will become yellow as well (you will end up with yellow spots on the pink shoes, where those white areas were)

To do this you would have to combine it with masking it out (there isn't an easy 1 click solution)

(but yes you could have used something like the trial version, or even free keying software like cinegobs keyer, but it won't be an easy "fix" for this, because of the overlapped whites and reflections, and indistinct borders)

[poisondeathray]

Can you upload a higher quality jpg? I can see if there is another (maybe easier) way than masking . You might be able to do a luma key with a rough garbage mask, but the shoe border transitions into white and might be tricky

[snafubaby]

Hi Here is the pic. It sounds kinda complicated, keeping the white shadows and reflections of the shoe, wile removing the white background.

[poisondeathray]

It's "doable", but not a simple 1 click solution. You basically have to mask out the shoe. You can do this in any graphics program e.g. photoshop, gimp etc...

You also have to decide what you want to do with the reflections on the shoe (white reflections and highlights with yellow background look unnatural) , and what to do with the ground shadows and reflections . For example you might alter them slightly and composite them back in. Same with the other highlights

If you want it to look good with minimum work, just reshoot it

[poisondeathray]

This is what you might expect with a "rough" mask and eliminating the ground shadows and reflections. I did a quick sloppy job on it - You would spend more time on the mask vertices if it was important to you . It might take a few minutes per frame, or more if you want to do a better job - if you have only 4 frames I guess it's not too bad. Once you have it masked out, you can switch out the background at will (it doesn't have to be a solid color, it can be anything, like a picture) by saving it with an alpha channel - transparency , then swapping in a different background

[snafubaby]

hi. The picture looks fantastic! If you could gimme a little tutorial on how to do that, i'd sure appreciate it. I read online that there is a software program called Paint.NET that will allow you to change the background of animated gifs. Not sure if it's an easy program to work with, or if the results will be what i'm trying to achieve, but i'm going to give that one a try as well. The ultimate goal, when i ever get the hang of working with animated gifs, is to make a transparent background.

Thanks! Talk to ya soon!

[poisondeathray]

gimp might be a better alterative for this than paint.net .

eitherway just search for masks and selections , pen tool , bezier masks - those are keywords to look for on youtube. There's got to be hundreds of tutorials

you just basically click and make points to trace along the outline of the object

[budwzr]

The background would look a lot better using the complementary color of the shoe. That would make it pop. Meh, give it a new shadow too.

[snafubaby]

I tried paint.NET, and wasn't impressed. I will just stick with GIMP. Your example is better than what i tried to come up with. I used Gimp, and messed with the alpha channels as suggested in this video i found on youtube. It's supposed to make the background transparent. It's not too clear on how the person did all that. I had to figure some of it out on my own. I'll just have to try and try again, i suppose. I am a big time novice when it comes to using Gimp, but that video helped out some.

Thanks for the suggestions on this project to both of you, Poisondeathray and Budwzr!

Anyway, here is the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8eLAPVxzXk

Talk to you soon!

Edit: I tried the technique in the video. Unfortunately, what you warned about happened. The background was removed, but unfortunately, the naturally occuring white parts of the shoe, the shadows and reflections of the camera flash, were removed, too. It looks ooooooohhhhkkkaaaayyy, but not great. I will experiment and try to see if i can duplicate your version. Cheers!

[poisondeathray]

I actually don't use gimp (photoshop), but it's the same basic procedure for masking in every program. I took a quick look at that video - it's not what I did . I'm talking about manual masking. Drawing points around shapes. Something more like this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbp8v3f_OgE

It's about "cut outs" (like cutting objects, people , whatever , out of a photo) .When you click and draw points around an object you make a layer selection

or maybe something like this
http://clippingpath.blogetery.com/how-to-remove-backgrounds-from-picture-using-gimp/

But instead of a lasso tool, I did it using a pen tool . You can experiment with the different tools, some work better for some situations

[budwzr]

What about some graphics?