How I make GIF Captions

After I read NREA comment on how I created one of my captions I decided to make a tutorial on how I created it. I know other people might have better ways of doing it, but here's how I did it.

Step 1. Like any good caption, it needs a good picture and a good story, so in this case choose a GIF that you like.

Step 2. Next I used GIMP, its a free photo-manipulation software, basically a poor-mans photoshop. You can grab that here. Once you have that installed and running move to the next step.

Step 3. This step is kinda long, but once you do it once, it becomes really easy to do, in this step we are gonna be adding a blank space to the GIF you picked, so we can put text on it without it actually going over the GIF.

This is the GIF I'm gonna be using for the tutorial so you have some frame of reference.

Ok, now you should have something that looks pretty similar to this. 

From here you're gonna click file, and then open as layers. 

Then you select the GIF you want to use.

You'll get a still frame of the GIF, this is the first frame that plays when you open a GIF, but for our purposes it doesn't really matter. From here you're gonna click on image, and then Canvas Size.

Now you should get a screen that looks like this. 

This shows you the current dimensions of the GIF you're manipulating. What I did for my last one was make it longer, so that there is just a blank space under the picture. You can change the Width and Height of the GIF to your liking, and in the preview box it show's you what the final version would look like.

After you've adjusted it to your liking, in my case I simply changed the height which adds a blank space to the bottom of the GIF, you're gonna click the bar towards the bottom that says Resize Layers, set it to All Visible Layers, then hit resize, now all the frames of the GIF are changed to your liking.

Now you go to file and then click on export.

Then you should have a screen that looks like this. Check the box that says "As Animation" and another one that says "Loop Forever", there are a few other options here, but I've never had to mess with them. Now click on export, and save your file where you can easily get it.

Now you should have a GIF that looks like this.

It's exactly the same as the one we started with, expect it has that blank space at the bottom, where you put your text. 

Step 4. Now all you have to do is add text to your image, you can also use GIMP for this, but in my experience, I've found that to be kind of wonky. I've had better results uploading my manipulated GIF to this website. Online Image Editor.

From there it's pretty straight forward, this is where I had my text to the GIF, because I feel it looks cleaner here than adding it on GIMP, they also have tons of tools for you to use. Sometimes I've had to add a line of text or two, save the GIF, and then re-upload it with my changes saved to get it just the way I want it.

Well, there it is, I hope that helped, if anybody has any questions, comments or advice, please feel free to leave it, I love comments/criticism.