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Neural Filters Tutorial for Gifmakers by @antoniosvivaldi
Hi everyone! In light of my blog’s 10th birthday, I’m delighted to reveal my highly anticipated gifmaking tutorial using Neural Filters - a very powerful collection of filters that really broadened my scope in gifmaking over the past 12 months.
Before I get into this tutorial, I want to thank @laurabenanti, @maines , @cobbbvanth, and @cal-kestis for their unconditional support over the course of my journey of investigating the Neural Filters & their valuable inputs on the rendering performance!
In this tutorial, I will outline what the Photoshop Neural Filters do and how I use them in my workflow - multiple examples will be provided for better clarity. Finally, I will talk about some known performance issues with the filters & some feasible workarounds.
Tutorial Structure:
- Meet the Neural Filters: What they are and what they do
- Why I use Neural Filters? How I use Neural Filters in my giffing workflow
- Getting started: The giffing workflow in a nutshell and installing the Neural Filters
- Applying Neural Filters onto your gif: Making use of the Neural Filters settings; with multiple examples
- Testing your system: recommended if you’re using Neural Filters for the first time
- Rendering performance: Common Neural Filters performance issues & workarounds
For quick reference, here are the examples that I will show in this tutorial:
- Example 1: Image Enhancement | improving the image quality of gifs prepared from highly compressed video files
- Example 2: Facial Enhancement | enhancing an individual's facial features
- Example 3: Colour Manipulation | colourising B&W gifs for a colourful gifset
- Example 4: Artistic effects | transforming landscapes & adding artistic effects onto your gifs
- Example 5: Putting it all together | my usual giffing workflow using Neural Filters
What you need & need to know:
- Software: Photoshop 2021 or later (recommended: 2023 or later)*
- Hardware: 8GB of RAM; having a supported GPU is highly recommended*
- Difficulty: Advanced (requires a lot of patience); knowledge in gifmaking and using video timeline assumed
- Key concepts: Smart Layer / Smart Filters
- Benchmarking your system: Neural Filters test files**
- Supplementary materials: Tutorial Resources / Detailed findings on rendering gifs with Neural Filters + known issues***
*I primarily gif on an M2 Max MacBook Pro that's running Photoshop 2024, but I also have experiences gifmaking on few other Mac models from 2012 ~ 2023.
**Using Neural Filters can be resource intensive, so it’s helpful to run the test files yourself. I’ll outline some known performance issues with Neural Filters and workarounds later in the tutorial.
***This supplementary page contains additional Neural Filters benchmark tests and instructions, as well as more information on the rendering performance (for Apple Silicon-based devices) when subject to heavy Neural Filters gifmaking workflows
Tutorial under the cut. Like / Reblog this post if you find this tutorial helpful. Linking this post as an inspo link will also be greatly appreciated!
