Quick Tips #3: Better looping gifs (Patreon)

Bonus round: makes them smaller, too! 
I'm using a gif I made for ESO:Morrowind's release as an example. Here's the original, unedited gif, created from a movie file. It's not bad, but there's a bit of pop in the lights and in the moving NPCs. At 80 frames and 1000x1000 pixels, it is 16.5 MB. 

All that I really want to move here is the flames in the braziers. With that in mind, I scroll to the very last frame of my timeline and duplicate the top layer. This propagates that new layer on every frame of the timeline. Next, I erase (or mask out) the parts of the image that I want to move: in this case, the braziers. This means that the non-erased parts will be present on every frame, and the only parts that will animate are the parts I erased. 

As a final step, I tend to apply a curves adjustment layer to my gifs which makes the darks darker and the brights brighter. This is just some artistic compensation for the reduction in quality you see when turning something from movie with 16 million colors to a gif with 256. 
Here's the final result. At the same frame length and size as the original, it is only 2.8 MB. 

(Using a circle gradient mask, instead of just erasing out a circle, would have worked even better)