juanabaloo

[juanabaloo]

hi, friends! i've gotten a few requests recently asking me about my colouring technique and thought it would be a good time to make a tutorial of what each step i personally go through. what you'll need beforehand is knowledge of how to make a gif (cropping, sharpening, speed setting and saving your gif) as this tutorial will only focus on colouring your gifs. please note: every gif colouring process will be different that depends on various factors and what might work for one gif, might not work for another. so please keep that in mind as you read on.

we'll start with a basic gif that's already been cropped and sharpened down below:

the first step i always take with any gif i'm working on is curves. now usually, i use the bright eyedropper and select the lightest part of the gif to brighten it up, but the outcomes weren't to my liking (which is normal). so i took it upon myself to manipulate it myself and came to this:

here are the results after:

now we're no longer in the dark! my next step is to use brightness/contrast which i always have the same input when i use it. even if a gif is already light enough, i think it adds needed dimension which i tend to go for:

and after that layer, we're left with this:

a slight change, but change nonetheless. if you're worried about your gif being too bright, leave this layer out! otherwise, let's keep going.

the next step i use in my colouring is levels. i love using levels for more contrast in darkening. like brightness/contrast, i use the same settings about 99.99% of the time:

after that, this is what the gif is looking like:

brightness/contrast and levels are my main two nonnegotiable layers that i swear by when it comes to any gif, since they're nearly always the same.

next, is color balance. since the skintone is more red than i'd like, i go in with more greens and cyans to help counter the magenta and red hues going on. i use all three channels: shadows, midtones and highlights. like always, it's up to your preference, but i prefer a more cooler tone if i can manage. here are my settings for that:

and this is what we have to work with after:

you can stop here if you're completely satisfied, however i have one more layer that i like to use: selective color. if contrast is what you want, i feel like this layer truly helps deepen the colours that are already present in the gif as well as able to take them away if need be. since her skintone is still on the yellow side, i want to take more of that away, but not so much to where the gif looks dull. below are my settings for how i achieved that:

and here is the final completed gif:

and that's the end of this tutorial. i hope this was in any way helpful and made some sort of sense. if you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to reach out! practice and patience are my biggest tips and experimenting as giffing as a whole can be somewhat unpredictable. if you've made it this far thank you for reading and if this is able to help even one person in any capacity, it's worth it!

[juanabaloo]

[juanabaloo]

25 Days of Bring It On! (Day 4)

(video credit to Titlesfromfilms)

So you haven't seen Bring It On (2000) yet? Enjoy a spoiler free end credits video! There are bloopers and a great dance set, all set to the B*Witched version of the classic song "Mickey." (no really, they use the * in their name, I'm not censoring it!)

(images credit to IMDB)

25 days for 25 years

[juanabaloo]

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER | Season 4

[juanabaloo]

is your house a 'take off your shoes at the entrance' type of home?

[juanabaloo]

SHARPENING TUTORIAL — requested by anon

First and foremost, I apologize ahead of time because this is not going to be an action. At the end of the tutorial, I'm going to include a link to a PSD with the smart filters plugged in. So you don't have to go through the trouble of loading an action and then playing it. Before we get started, this will only be compatible with photoshop. Also, you must have a basic knowledge of giffing and photoshop and how to convert all your layers for smart filters. If you cannot do that, this tutorial might not be for you.

Go to Filter > Smart Sharpen. Amount should be set to 500%, then your radius amount must be set to 0.4px. Make sure you remove the Gaussian Blur, and don't touch any of the other settings.

Go to Filter > Smart Sharpen. Amount should be set to 20% - 40% (play around with it, see what looks good). Radius should be set to 20px (again, play around with it, see what looks good).

Go to Filter > Camera Raw Filter. Find the Effects tab. Texture should be anywhere from +25 to +45 (sometimes, depending on the movie, I have it in the high 60s or 80s). Then set Clarity anywhere from 10 to 25 (again, it all depends on the movie, play around with the sliders). Find the Detail Tab next. Set the Sharpening anywhere from 5 - 15. Set Noise Reduction anywhere from 10 - 20.

Go to Filter > Other > High Pass. The radius should be .4px, then go to the blending options and set it to soft light, or screen. I usually set mine to soft light.

The last step is the blurring. It subtracts a little bit of the grain that the denoise didn't cancel out. Set the radius to 1px, and then go to blending options and set it anywhere from 10% to 25%. Click here to download the psd with the coloring included. It will load as one screencap and the smart filters will be there. You're going to window the psd and then drag the smart filter settings to the caps of your choosing.

[juanabaloo]

as a pink lover. The ""universal""" hatred of the color pink by young girls is due to the heavy expectation of femininity forced on them. It is an expression of frustration at gender roles. It is not internalized misogyny. No you will not inevitably start liking pink as an adult and if you do that is not healing your inner divine feminine or whatever we're saying now. Its a color. 😁👍

[juanabaloo]

A Buffy s2 study because I’m trying to digitally paint more !

[juanabaloo]

25 Days of Bring It On! (Day 3)

Did you know? The original 2000 Bring It On movie spawned a franchise. Six more movies were released direct to video. They starred Solange Knowles (yes the singer!), Hayden Panettiere (Heroes), Francia Raisa (Grownish), Ashley Benson (Pretty Little Liars), and Christina Milian (Dexter: Original Sin), among others.

But also... There's the made for TV horror movie Bring It On Cheer or Die! There's Bring It On: The Musical! Scenes in the 2001 parody movie Not Another Teen Movie! There's a book on the original movie by Kase Wickman! (Full book title: "Bring It On: The Complete Story of the Cheerleading Movie That Changed, Like, Everything")

Eliza Dushku (who played Missy) even makes a Bring It On joke in one of her other movies. (The gif below is the start of the scene.)

And 6 years before Battleship, the 3rd Bring It On movie (Bring It On: All or Nothing) included Rihanna, as herself. It was her first movie credit!

(all images credit to IMDB, except for: 6 movie cheer pack poster is Amazon, Bring It On The Musical is Zilker Theatre Productions in Austin TX, book cover is Goodreads)

(Eliza gif thanks to dushkugifs)

Letterboxd list of the movies

Goodreads info for the Kase Wickman book

25 days for 25 years

[juanabaloo]

25 Days of Bring It On! (Day 2)

(video credit to Universal Pictures All-Access)

Here is the Clover-focused trailer. This has all the extra Clover scenes they filmed to con people into thinking The Clovers are in it more than they are. Because in test screenings people loved The Clovers, but the movie was already finished.

The movie should have had more of The Clovers!

(images credit to IMDB)

25 days for 25 years

[juanabaloo]

25 Days of Bring It On! (Day 1)

(video credit to Icon Film Distribution)

Kicking off 25 days of Bring It On (2000) with one of the trailers!

This is the one that DOESN'T have all the extra Clover scenes they filmed to con people into thinking The Clovers are in it more than they are. Because in test screenings people loved The Clovers, but the movie was already finished.

(images credit to IMDB)

25 days for 25 years

[juanabaloo]

25 Years of Bring It On!

Bring It On is one of my favorite movies and it turns 25 years old this summer. I'll be doing posts for it this month to celebrate!

(all images credit to IMDB)

25 days for 25 years

[juanabaloo]

Indya Moore wearing Trashy Clothing for Dazed Middle East, ph. Zora Sicher [2025]

[juanabaloo]

fuffy should have fucked on the street in touched. imo

[juanabaloo]

God Eliza Dushku and SMG are so incredibly fucking good at effortlessly playing each other's characters and it's like 90% of why this two parter is one of my favs

[juanabaloo]

okay i know it's probably because she's a relatively minor character who only really exists for comic relief. however. i think it's odd that spike is the one who gets paraded around by the fandom as The Exception to general vampire behavior when harmony kendall is literally right there.

does she eat people? yeah. but she very obviously doesn't do it out of any kind of malice. a girl's gotta eat, y'know? but unlike literally every vampire we know of, when she returns to someone she knew as a human (cordelia), it's legitimately just to hang out with her. and yes, she has a LITTLE trouble with her bloodlust, but she keeps it mostly under control all on her own. even spike returned to his own mother to kill her (with good intentions, but still). harmony just wanted to hang out and find a place she could fit.

is she a bad person? yeah, but only kinda. she's quick to double-cross and, again, eats people. she's disloyal and vain and selfish. but the fascinating thing about her is that none of those traits (except for the eating people) came from her becoming a vampire. she was all those things even as a human, and simply retained them into vampirism. but they also didn't really get any worse. functionally, she's the exact same person she was before being turned, which is nuts because no other vampire had that experience. would she have killed people as readily as a person? probably not, but the fact that her behavior and personality haven't changed at all... i feel like that's super fucking significant. right???

which isn't to say that spike isn't also an outlier to a certain extent, or that his more aggressive traits didn't exist in some form when he was human, but his change was big. noticeable. yeah, he's one of the more human vampires in the buffyverse. his ability and willingness to change and grow for the better shouldn't be dismissed. but he also only really changed because of external forces (the chip, buffy's belief in him, the soul). without them, he just wouldn't have changed the way he did. he was better than a lot of other vampires, but he was still a vampire.

where spike chose not to eat people after the chip and to win buffy's affections (something only really perceived as possible by anyone due to the chip), harmony chooses not to eat people without anything forcing her into that position. be it money, attention, acclaim, etc, she's perfectly willing to not be evil if it just means getting those things. no chip needed, no soul needed. someone says don't eat people, she doesn't eat people! mostly. she's not perfect, and she's still not a good person, but yeah.

[juanabaloo]

Are you in the USA? Do you have the Libby library app?

If not, download it to your phone, and under "Add library card" select the button to search for a library and start typing in "queer"...

Sign up with an email, no actual address required, and you are good to go 🏳️‍🌈

[ID: A screenshot of the Queer Liberation Library Libby main page, showing 6 titles, one of which is an audio book. The titles displayed are the Trans Teen Survival Guide; Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next); We Will Be Shelter: Poems for Survival; Tomboy Survival Guide; A Burst of Light and Other Essays; and Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction. End ID]

(thank you @teddypoi-qd for the ID!]

EDIT: Here is the Queer Liberation Library's donation page!