itsphotoshop:

• Tutorial by itsphotoshop.
• I use Photoshop CS6.
• Like/reblog the post if you find it useful.
• This tutorial is for beginners.

Fonts; remember: set them all to bold and italic [x]

People ask us daily which are the best fonts for subtitles. I recommend Calibri, but Arial and Myriad Pro are good choices too. Below you can see how they look. There isn’t much different, but still I think Calibri is the best-looking one.

• Calibri (download) 
  
  

  

  
  
  
• Arial (default font)
  
  

  

  
  
  
• Myriad Pro (download)
  
  

Blending options; Right click in the text layer > Blending options [x]

• Stroke - settings
  Remember to always add stroke. The subtitles don’t look like subtitles without the border:
  

  

  The stroke doesn’t have to be black. Some people use other colors. For example:[x]

• Drop shadow - settings (you can change them to your like)
  Drop shadow isn’t necessary, but I like how it looks so I always add it. Of course, it’s your choice. This is how subtitles look without it:
  
  

  As you see, it looks good, so do whatever you want.

Colors;

Colors are all about who talks in the gif/photoset. If only one person talks most people use white [x] [x], but yellow looks good too [x].

So when there’s a conversation betweet two people, usually one talks white and the other talks yellow: [x] [x] But some people use the stroke color to distinguish when people talk: [x]

People also use blue when there’s a third person, or maybe another tone of yellow.

As always, it’s your choice. This is just advice.

Sizes;

The size of the subtitles depens on the size of your gif and how much text you want to put. When the gif is big and the text is short the size of the subtitles is bigger:

For that gif I used Myriad Pro, because I think it looks better that Calibri when it’s big, and its size is 18px.

If I use a small size with that gif it looks good too but I prefer the big size:

As always, it is your choice.

So when there’s more text and the gif is small, the subtitles have less size:

That’s calibri, 13px.

Others;

• Position. To make the subtiles be centered in your gif, make sure that when you make the text box, it looks like this. If it doesn’t you can make it bigger/smaller moving these. When you’ve written the text, go to Window > Paragraph, select all the text and click here.
  
  
• Lines separation. To change the separation between lines go to Window > Character, and change this. My font is Calibri and its size is 14px. If I keep the lines separation in “Auto” my subtitiles look like this:
  
  

  

  I think the lines are too separated that’s why I’ve changed the separation to 12px (a little bit less that 14px):

  

How to make them appear/disappear

Sometimes, when you make a gif, the person stops talking and the subtitles are still there. If you want them to disappear, you have to  do it before converting to timeline. It’s really easy: select all the frames where you don’t want the subtitles, and make the text invisible by clicking on the eye next to the text layer:

This is how the gif looks:

In my opinion the subtitles disappear too fast. That’s why I add the fading effect:

To make that, keep the text layer selected and select the frame where you want to start the fading effect. Change the text layer’s opacity to 80%. Select the next frame and change the text layer’s opacity to 60%. Next frame: 40%. Next frame: 20%. That’s how I did it, but you can use different percentages.

You can use the fast disappearing way when the scene changes, for example:

And then there’s this thing where there’re two texts in the same scene.

Pretty easy to do: Make 2 different text layers. Select the frames where you want the 1st text layer to be in and make invisible the 2nd text layer (by clicking in the eye next to it). Then select the frames where you want the 2nd text layer to be in and make invisible the 1st text layer.

That’s all that comes to my mind right now! I hope you found this tutorial useful.

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