#*giffing is a learning curve but i'm getting better

[baekslight]

exo cbx - blooming day

[sanarsi]

Kinktober Day 8

Uniforms

husband!Reed Richards x wife!f!Reader

Gif credits @a7estrellas

Summary: You try on your new uniform for the first time. Reed can't keep his hands to himself at the sight of you. Warnings: +18, MDNI, dirty talk, pet names, unprotected PIV, soft!dom!Reed, ovulation sex, mention of pregnancy, creampie Wordcount: 1k An: Kinktober is testin my nerves and endurance. It's only day 8 and I'm already starting to hear voices (just kidding). I'm on vacation in Italy and having a really great time <3 I have a feeling that after this trip I'll have more inspiration than I'll be able to write, so get ready bitchesss, love you xx

Masterlist and Kinktober Masterlist

After a few minutes of struggling, you managed to squeeze into your new uniform. The material was different from the previous one. This one was more flexible and seemed stronger and was also tighter.

It definitely emphasized your curves and everything it should better, but not too much; your husband wouldn't let others drool over you.

You looked at your reflection, judging how you looked in blue. It wasn't bad. Reed had definitely picked the best shade that suited you. You smiled at the thought and bit your lip, wondering how your husband would react to seeing you now, with his handiwork on your body.

You were sure that his thoughts while working were focused on something other than safety, but it didn't bother you. The only thing you worried about was him losing concentration during the mission because, damn, you looked hot.

And after so many years of marriage, you learned that Reed couldn't keep his hands to himself. And again you were convinced of it as quickly as the thought crossed your mind.

“Mmm.” His soft purr echoed against your ear. A blissful smile spread across your lips as you felt his arms wrap around your waist. “Mrs. Richards, you look stunning.”

You laughed sweetly as he began to place kisses on your neck and his beard began to irritate your skin.

“Yeah?” You tangled your fingers in his hair, resting your head on his shoulder so he had better access to you. “It’s all thanks to my husband.”

He gasped, pulling you into his chest and running his nose down your neck, inhaling your scent.

“Your husband is a lucky man.”

“And he’s also very jealous,” you added with amusement, and you looked at your reflection to see that he had a smirk on his lips. Warmth began to gather in your belly at the sight.

His gaze slowly traveled up your legs, to your hips and waist, around which he tightened his grip.

“Of a woman like you, anyone would be jealous,” he whispered in your ear and ran his gaze over your chest until he finally locked eyes with you. “I dare say that even some would kill for you.”

You turned your head towards him and you immediately crashed your lips together. Softly, passionately and deeply, you kissed until you ran out of breath. You opened your mouth to ask but—

“We have ten minutes,” he announced, anticipating your question, as if he read your mind.

“So we better hurry.”

You smiled widely and that was enough for him to take off his glasses, throw them carelessly on the bed and turn you towards him, crashing his lips firmly into yours.

Not caring at all, he reached to your crotch and ripped a hole in your uniform. You gasped into his mouth, running your hand over his hard cock.

“I knew this color would be perfect.”

He did the same with his outfit and before you could even react, he grabbed your thighs, gathering you into his arms. You hugged him tightly, kissing him harder and hungrier.

“You destroyed—”

“Fuck it,” he gasped, pinning you to the wall with his body. “I’ll make new ones.”

You shivered as he attacked your neck again, and after a moment he positioned his tip right at your entrance.

“Honey, wai—”

But it was too late.

Reed entered you with one hard thrust, your moans echoing throughout the house. He bit into your flesh as he began to thrust into you, immediately setting the perfect pace that you loved so damn much.

You winced at the sudden pleasure that came with his cock. Your moans only fueled him more, making him try to stifle his growls against your skin.

“I’m ovulating,” you managed to choke out. That information didn’t change anything, though, only seemed to inflame him more.

You would have been surprised by his reaction if it weren't for the fact that he was thrusting into you so hard you could barely catch your breath.

“Then we’re gonna make a fuckin’ baby,” he growled, pulling away from your neck and looking at your face overcome with pleasure.

Panting heavily, he watched as you became cockdrunk and your gaze just begs him to bring you to the edge.

Your clit throbbed harder with each thrust, gathering all the pleasure in one spot. Reed groaned as he felt you tighten around him, crashing his lips against yours. The sloppy kiss quickly turned into an exchange of gasps, squeals, and moans as his cock filled you perfectly over and over again.

“Make me come,” you whispered, feeling the waves of your impending orgasm wash over your body.

“Anything for my wife.” He smiled blissfully and tightened his grip on your ass.

Your bodies slapped against each other as your juices began to flow down his thighs.

Hearing how wet he made you, he barely restrained himself from throwing you on the bed and fucking you for another hour until both of you couldn't move.

“Yes.” You fisted your fingers in his hair, looking into his eyes with a desire that told him clearly how close you were. “Yes,” you whimpered, feeling the pleasure building in your core until one final thrust brought you to your peak. You moaned loudly, holding him painfully tight as you began to tremble in his arms.

Reed continued to thrust into you, prolonging your orgasm and chasing his own, which quickly made itself known as you began to clench around him.

“Oh fuck, baby,” he groaned, holding you tighter and keeping you still as he came.

He cummed deep inside you, thrusting a few more times until his balls were empty and you were full.

You panted heavily, calming your racing hearts in silence. He began to place soft kisses along your shoulder and neck until he reached your lips, which he greeted with a slow kiss. You hummed against his lips, running your fingers over his scalp and lazily returning the caress.

“You know what?” he asked, his voice slightly hoarse.

“What?”

“We made it in eight minutes.”

You blinked a few times before bursting out laughing at the comment and how proud he sounded. The sight of you made him smile.

“We've been breaking records lately,” you said, amused, stroking his cheeks.

He just smiled wider and connected your lips again.

Tags: @mattmurdocksdumpy @milly-louise @rosi3ba3z @candlelover @gothcsz @tateypots @chloe302225 @natalieispunk @amyispxnk @mandoloriancookie @libre-sol @alex-does-art-things @xxchumanixx @ch3rryyyyyyyyyy @bbyanarchist @la-vie-est-une-fleur29 @ilovejoel-andjavi @uncassettodiricordi @puddles221b @syd-djarin

[gwenpendragns]

i was asked by @matthew-macfadyens for a colouring tutorial, so here we go ! i've been making gifs for almost 4 years now and finally feel comfortable and confident in my skills to make a full tutorial on my colouring process. there are so many different ways people colour gifs, and there's no wrong way, this is just how i do it ! i learned to gif by reading so many tutorials and picking and choosing what works for me, so hopefully this can help someone out !

if this tutorial helps you, please considering supporting me ! buy me coffee ♡

TUTORIAL UNDER THE CUT

what you'll need: - photoshop ( i use ps cc 2023 & frame timeline ) - basic ps knowledge ( how to make gifs, how to sharpen gifs, general understanding of adjustment layers, layer masks and blending modes ) - a whole lot of patience

helpful resources:

the beginner's guide to channel mixer by @aubrey-plaza

giffing 101 by @cillianmurphy

gif making for beginners by @hayaosmiyazaki

colouring yellow-tinted shots by @ajusnice

becca's mega colouring tutorial by @nataliescatorccio

@usergif

PART ONE: BASE COLOURING

- step 1: curves - step 2: exposure - step 3: colour balance - step 4: selective colour - step 5: levels - step 6: brightness / contrast - step 7: gradient map

okay so, before we get started, this tutorial is for colouring only. at this point, i've already gotten my screencaps, imported them into photoshop, made the actual gif & sharpened the gif. the above image includes what my typical adjustment layer stack looks like !

STEP ONE: CURVES

a lot of people do the majority of their heavy lifting in curves...i'm not one of those people. i've never gotten the hang of curves and haven't been able to fully taken advantage of everything it can offer. i use curves to mainly brighten up my gif and to start my process.

i use the "auto" button in the curves function - this automatically corrects the curves for your gif ( mainly the brightness / contrast )

you can see that the auto curves has brightened up the gif and evened out the brightness/contrast. i just find this gives a better starting point for the colouring process.

STEP TWO: EXPOSURE

this step is for, you guessed it, brightening the gif more and evening out the contrast and blacks. i don't have any real rules for doing this, the amount i highten the exposure and contrast is different based on the scene and the show, however, i tend to stay around +1 on both exposure and gamma correction.

exposure effects the brightness of the gif and gamma correction effects the blacks and contrast. this step also effects the saturation of the gif, so it's important not to go too crazy. i often end up coming back to this step every now and again to adjust and fiddle with it.

for this gif, i put the exposure at +1.18 and the gamma correction at 0.85

you can see this step serves to add some more brightness and contrast - it also adds some more saturation, that we don't always want, but don't worry, that's what the next steps are for !

STEP THREE: COLOUR BALANCE

i use this step to do a lot of my heavy lifting - i'm a whore for colour balance. this serves to even out the colours and help neutralize the colours for an easier canvas. it's important to understand the basics of colour theory for this, i recommend checking out the channel mixer tutorial i listed above, because a lot of those steps applies to colour balance.

essentially, there's three separate profiles to edit on - highlights, midtones and shadows. in each profile, you have 3 colour sliders. the top one is your cyan to red, middle is magenta to green, and bottom is yellow to blue. the colouring of the scene will decide where to move your sliders.

for example: if your original scene has a cyan tint to it, you'll want to pull your slider to the right, towards the red to help neutralize the cyan. if your scene has a green tint, you'll want to pull it left towards the magenta. as you move the sliders, you'll notice that sometimes it brings out other colours you don't necessarily need, you can adjust the other sliders to help neutralize further.

i always do my main correction in the midtones profile.

since this scene has a heavy yellow tint, my first step was to adjust the bottom slider. i pulled the slider to the right towards blue at +22. you can see this helped get rid of a lot of the yellow, but adding in the blue warmed up the reds and made it more saturated.

to help with this, i pulled the top slider left towards cyan to help neutralize that red.

i pulled the top slider to -28 and you can see this cut out that heavy saturation and redness. it's looking a lot better, but now it's a little too green for my liking. this is where that middle slider comes in!

i pulled the middle slider to -6 towards the magenta to help counteract the green that came in. ( i ended up going back in and adjusting the bottom slider to +10 instead, as it was a little to blue )

you can see this step really did the heavy lifting, helping to neutralize the canvas so that it's easier to work with...but it's not quite perfect yet!

STEP FOUR: SELECTIVE COLOUR

a lot of the same principles around colour theory apply to selective colour! this is where i go to adjust the colours according to what my colour palette is. for this gif, the overall colour is going to be purple, so i'll adjust the individual colours with that in mind.

i only ever adjust my red, yellow, white and black profiles! sometimes i'll do the other colours, but that's only for tweaking the final colour. i normally don't touch them at all.

ps: you'll notice i prefer a cooler toned gif, and almost always go for a more magenta looking red/yellow.

i always start with my yellows:

in the yellow profile, i pull my cyan towards the left to -38 (this helps eliminate the green in the yellows) and my yellow slider to the left to -27 (this cools down the yellows. i top it off by adjusting my magenta slider to -10, to help lower the saturation of the yellows.

you'll notice this step got rid of most of the green undertones - that's because the green was nested inside the yellows, so by taking out a lot of the cyan and yellow, you're left with a warmer yellow as opposed to a cooler yellow.

next i go on to my reds. this step will mainly effect the alys's skin tone, but i'm going to do pretty much the same as above but with much less dramatic of a change. lowering your colours in your red profile too much can lead to a very saturated gif, which is not what i'm going for.

i pulled my cyan slider to -19, magenta to -9 and yellow to -15. you can see this helped add some more cooler tones to the reds.

the next profiles are your white and black profiles. i use white to brighten the lightest parts of the gif. no rhyme or reason here, i just pull the black slider towards the left...usually around -25. for the black profile, i always move the black slider towards the right. anywhere from +3 to +8, depending on the gif. for this gif, i did +8. this darkens the blacks and, in my opinion, helps the gif pop!

you can see this step got rid of the yellow tint, gave the gif a more neutral look and adjusted the reds to better compliment a purple colour scheme !

STEP FIVE: LEVELS

this adjustment has three toggles - i'm not 100% sure what each toggle really does, i just know that by pulling the leftmost toggle to the right, it darkens your gif, and pulling the rightmost toggle to the left brightens your gif.

this step is so hard to explain, but really i just pull the toggles around until it looks good...sorry !

STEP SIX: BRIGHTNESS / CONTRAST

this step is exactly what it says on the tin...it brightens your gif. this step is based on your scene and personal preference, there's no real guide to it.

i always pull my brightness slider to the right ( brighter ) and my contrast slider to the left ( less contrast ).

STEP SEVEN: GRADIENT MAP

this last step is something i learned from @nataliescatorccio ! i add a gradient map to the top of my stack, and choose a lighter colour of what i want my overall gif to be. in this case, i used a very light purple!

i then set the blending mode to "soft light" and lower the opacity to anywhere from 20-30%. for this gif, i did 30%

this step will help make your colour pop once you do your main colouring!

PART TWO: PAINTING & COLOURING

- step 1: layer 1 - step 2: layer 2 - step 3: layer 3 - step 4: final touches

okay, so my actual colouring process is based in 3 layers. for this gif, i'm using a deep purple/mauve colour !

STEP ONE: LAYER ONE

between your brightness/contrast and gradient map layers, add another blank layer. change the blending mode of this layer to "colour" and set the opacity to 40%.

then, using a soft round brush with an opacity of 100% ( size of the brush is your preference, i typically use around 108 ), colour the parts of the gif you want coloured !

you can see this helps us get the canvas to a more uniform purple colour!

STEP TWO: LAYER TWO

for layer two we're going to do the exact same thing. add a layer above your previous, set to "colour" at 40%. we're going to go over the same areas!

you can see this helped get the purple so much more vibrant and closer to what our final colour is going to be!

STEP THREE: LAYER THREE

for our final layer, add another layer above the previous 2, set your blending mode to "multiply" and your opacity to anything from 60%-100%. for this gif, i did 60% !

now, our colouring is pretty much done but you can see that, now that our colour is down, alys's face is still a little too blue/green/yellow for the background purple. the next step, we're going to adjust and add final touches!

STEP FOUR: FINAL TOUCHES

at this point, i went back into my selective colour layer and adjusted my yellows & reds and went back into my colour balance layer to adjust everything overall.

at this point, i'm going to go in and add some adjustments layers above everything - i usually add some brightness/contrast, and a selective colour layer to darken the blacks.

which brings us to our final result:

[lj-lephemstar]

Progress Checkup! (Nov. 2024) | Scratchin' Melodii Devlog

​​Hey again guys! Sorry if it's been a bit since the last devlog. With how much I've been up to, it sure feels like it!

Let's get right into it. For starters, the 3rd rival battle of Act 2 is complete! I'll likely be showing a gameplay preview of it sometime soon. This is the first song to use the new framework that I'll be using for all the other stages going forward, which also means I've had to spend the past couple weeks getting the previous songs working with this new system too... Did you know that in the demo builds, if I wanted to change something about the gameplay, I'd have to manually go back and change it for EACH individual song one by one? Well now, imagine all the songs had like a peace treaty to just share one good, clean, and organized system that I can easily tweak and add to as I please. So development is gonna be smoother than ever from here! This is how most games are SUPPOSED to work, but I was a liiittle too stupid to figure out how to do this until recently!

While I was moving Cream Cheese Icing over to this new system, I took the opportunity to make the chart a bit more beginner-friendly! For example, the first line went from this...

To just this!

As you can see, it has less notes, therefore it is less scary for new players. Believe it or not, I actually never intended for Cream Cheese Icing to be so difficult for new players in the first place! Naturally, being too good at my own game can make gauging the difficulty curve a bit tricky at times, but I think I'm figuring it out!​

You may have also noticed that the characters have new UI icons too! I felt like the old ones were too flat and boring, so I did a new take on them, aiming for more dynamic shapes and angles, not to mention how my art style's just kinda grown a bit in general since I last drew the icons. I also ended up leaving out the circles behind them. I was a little worried I was gonna run out of unique colors for all of them at some point, plus SOME of these guys can have really big hair and/or hats that pretty much just cover up the whole circle anyway. (hi rensa)

Speaking of artwork, here's a little look at some of the updated animation I've done for Stir & Mix! (Try to imagine it in not highly-compressed-gif-form. I promise it looks better in-game!)

When working on Stir & Mix related stuff, I can't help but feel a bit of a sense of dread knowing how people may react to it... Honestly, sometimes I kinda wish it never got as popular as it did in 2022. But hey, doing my own thing regardless of what's expected of me is the most Scratchin' Melodii thing I could do!

Speaking of which, Mia learned a ton of new stuff while doing the VOCALOID tuning for the last rival battle we worked on, so we might revisit Stir & Mix's vocals again at some point before release to give it even more style! (By the way, Mia and 2cada are the same person! Sorry if I refer to both names interchangeably! She's been the one doing all the VOCALOID tuning and vocal mixing for the game since 2023.)

Well, I think that's all for now! Here's another friendly reminder that there will NOT be anymore demos of the game. Any new content will be saved for the full game's release. I know I've said it before, but I probably won't stop saying it until people stop getting confused about it LOL. Thanks for reading!! I appreciate you. - LJ

[novaonhere]

Quiet Nights

Relationship: Cal Kestis x f!reader

Summary: Cal has a dream that totally goes against the Jedi code. During his panic, you come to check on him and find him in a comprisable position.

Word Count: 2.7k

Warnings: ITS SMUT TIME FOLKS, 18+, oral f! receiving, no condom, cussing, choking (duh the force?)

A/N: Delicious, I drank a full 32 oz of water after this

Prompt: Imagine your OTP where one of them had a dream about the other person and tries to act normal, but fails miserably, so the other one notices and gets curious about what the dream was about.

(gif not mine)

————————————————————————

You yawn, filling up your cup with water from the bathroom sink. You gulp it down, refreshing you as much as a glass of water at 3:34 am could. It was nice having a bigger bathroom; you're used to the small Mantis bathroom instead of this spacious one on Jedah. You, Cal, Bode, and Greez have arrived to the Hidden Path's base to touch base with Cere and learn more about this Tanalorr place. It seemed intriguing, but you were still on the fence if such a place could even exist.

Now here you stand, staring yourself down in the mirror, filling up another glass of water. As soon as you turn off the tap, a very faint and quiet noise echoes throughout the halls. Curious, you open the door, the noise just becoming ever so slightly louder. Time to investigate!

---

Cal twists and turns in his guest bed, his entire upper body reddened. Soft moans escape his lips. He was burning, and he couldn't bring himself to wake up. Hell, he didn't want to wake up. This was the best dream he had ever had!

You had surprised him with a night for just the two of you, walking through the forests on a planet he could not name. The trees towered above you, vibrant with their green leaves. They bring in just enough light to highlight the rugged dirt path. You both were holding hands, just enjoying each other presence. Now, the dream changed, and it most definitely explains Cal's reddened complexion as he lies in bed.

You're now hovering over him, in a beautiful matching set, perfectly complementing your skin tone. Lace runs up and down your body, showing off your curves and parts that Cal only wishes he could actually touch. You leaned in for a passionate kiss, straddling the man. He could basically feel you in his subconscious.

---

The sounds started to become louder the closer you got to you and the guest bedroom next door. Who was staying in there again? Is that Cal? You tip toe up to the door, placing an ear beside it. Yep, that's him, is he alright? You knock quietly, waiting for a response. The response never came. You knock a bit louder this time. A gasp fills the room, as well as some frantic shuffling.

"Cal?" You whisper to the door, the shuffling stopping immediately. "Are you alright?"

"Come in," He blurted, immediately regretting it. You hesitantly open the door, the light from the hallway showing a line of brightness on the man. He's sitting against the headboard, the blankets ruffled around his crotch and legs.

"Nightmares?" You ask, taking a step in and quietly closing the door behind you. "Would you like to talk about it?" You squint your eyes to get a better look at him, your eyes still adjusting to the dark. His are as wide as possible, extremely dilated from the darkness and the dream.

"I'm okay, thanks for checking, goodnight." He rambles, trying to sink into his bed. This only makes you more curious. As you eyes get more adjusted, you notice that his cheeks match his hair.

"Oh," You realize, blushing as well. "My apologizes." You giggle, taking a seat at the foot of the bed. "Who?" Cal just blinks.

"What?"

"Who was it! Mr. Jedi, Mr. I can't ever think about another person in a romantic or sexual way." You tease, playfully hitting his foot. He purses his lips together, causing your grin to only become greater. "Oh, come on Cal! This is big! Who?"

"Why is it so important?" He grumbles, crossing his arms across his chest.

"Oh my god, do I know them?" You cross your legs, fully facing the clearly embarrassed Jedi. He rolls his eyes, but the redness only darkens and spreads. You giggle gleefully. You hum, trying to think of who it could be.

You really hoped it was you. For months you've been trying to hint to him about your feelings, sometimes very vague, but other times very blunt. The rest of the crew caught on immediately, but the gears in Cal's brain just didn't seem to click. You've tried asking about dating and his romantic life, but he always brought up the Jedi Code, making your want for him only increase. You've had dreams, dreams of you being together, living through the rebellion, being together, domestically and intimately.

You're expression must softened as you were thinking because Cal coughed to get your attention. Now it was your turn to blush.

"You going to guess or let me go back to sleep?" He asked, rubbing his eyes. Now, you had a choice. Respect his want to go back to bed and continue about life, or be VERY BLUNT. You were tired, so there was only one right option.

"Was it me?" You ask, glancing around the room, trying to not meet his gaze. Cal's breath hitched, the blanket becoming too hot for his body. From the lack of response, you also started to heat up, clearing your throat. From the lack of response, you could only assume it was you. You. YOU?

You whip your head to face him, locking eyes. You... He wanted... you. You honestly couldn't believe it.

"Was it just a dream?" You mumble, Cal giving a questioning expression as you shift in your seated position. "Or do you actually have feelings?" You vulnerability seemed to easy Cal a bit, noticing how uncomfortable you were. He wanted to say the truth, but he didn't want to make it weird. Would it be weird? Eh, tonight was the "going for it" kinda night.

"Months." He simply states, trying to relax against his headboard. You perked your head up from your gaze into your lap. You cheeks redden, your breathing quickens, and something feels, different. The atmosphere feels intoxicating, but in a you shouldn't leave way. With the prolonged eye contact, you feel ass if Cal notices the feeling as well. You notice his hand are now at his sides, and there's an obvious lump by his lap. That weird feeling starts from your stomach and falls down your body, closer to your belly button.

"Months?" You repeat, raising an eyebrow. He purses his lips and nods. You hum. "Well..." You both grow silent, quiet. This had to be the quietest you too had ever been with each other. You waited for each other to make a move, but in all honesty, Cal was too vulnerable, physically. You start to feel the awkwardness subside and you feel yourself giggle.

"Hey, it's not funny." Cal frowns, while you shake your head.

"No, of course not." You compose yourself, scooting closer to the red head. "It's funny that we are telling each other we like each other with your dick out." Cal's face reddens completely, trying to compose himself as he places his hands over his lap. You outstretch your arms, pushing his hands away, causing the freckled man's eyes to widen dramatically. "Need any help?"

Cal practically springs up at you, locking your lips together in the most "I need you" kiss you've ever experienced. It was HOT. Like, you already started to sweat as your tongues fought each other. You needed him, you needed him so badly. He could feel that need from you, he wanted to provide that for you more than his dreams ever could. He pulled your up and into his lap, never once breaking the kiss. Your clit brushes against him, causing you to quiver in pleasure. He notices your movements and moves your hips back and forth on him, earning himself a quiet moan from you. He chuckles, retracting his lips from yours and goes for your neck. Your arms are around his shoulders, dragging your fingertips through his hair. You continue to moan and gasp into his ear, trying to stay quiet.

"You're wearing too many clothes for this," He comments, lifting the bottom of your shirt. You instantly comply, throwing it over your head and onto the floor. He goes back for your lips as you also tug on his shirt.

"Match?" You ask, giving him a small smile. He gladly follows through with your request, throwing his shirt toward yours. Your eyes wander down to his toned chest, scars and freckles decorating his body. You feel a fluttering sensation down there.

"Well if we're going to match you need that all off." He motions to the rest of your body, causing your to giggle and raise an eyebrow.

"You dont wear pants to bed, but a shirt?"

"Hey, my arms get cold. Allow me," He states going back in for a kiss. You immediately deepen it, allowing his tongue into your mouth to explore. All the while he waves his hand and your bra unclasps. Startled you pull away.

"Force?" You ask, tossing your bra away. He smiles, nodding, staring at you. He's never seen you like this, and boy was he going to enjoy and savor it. "Well, what else can you do?" He picks you up and slides you to be propped up where he once was, with the blanket still covering his lower half. He hooks his thumbs into the waistband of your shorts, but before he does any more, he looks up at you. This causes your to blush, appreciative of the asking for permission. The knot in your core only tightens, god he was hot. Nodding, he slips them down with ease, along with your underwear. He crawls up to your face, giving you more kisses. He starts to trail down your body, more moans and gasps leaving you as he goes over your bare body. Finally he reaches below your belly button. He places light kisses to your thighs as he opens your legs with his free hand. You're practically dripping with anticipation by this point. He continues to kiss you, going closer to your inner thighs and to your opening. Propping your legs open with his body and arm, he proceeds to trail more and more kisses closer and closer.

Your arms are clutching the sheets by your sides, the amount of pleasure awaiting you but just out of your reach. The amount of teasing is excruciating; you need him. You moan louder and louder the closer he gets to your clit. Then, he proceeds to rub his tongue around your clit in circles. Your breathing hitches and becomes irregular.

"Fuck-" You cry out, making Cal only want to do more things to you. You were already so wet that he easily slid a finger into you, causing you to moan. He pumps in and out of you, slowly, making sure to curl his fingers up into you. How he knew how to do this you'll never understand, but holy shit was he doing a good job. He slides in another finger, starting to pick up the pace. Your hips start to have a mind of their own, fighting against him to push him deeper.

"Tell me," he states, looking up at you. His chin is glistening with you, his eyes so dilated they were almost black. His mouth hung open slightly, totally getting off to pleasing you.

"Deeper," You whine, and he grants your wish. He pushes deeper into you, causing you to whine out in pleasure.

"Holy Shit, Cal," You cry out, breathing erratically. The knot in your core tightens more, needing to find a good time to release. He quickens the pace, leaning over you to bring your lips together. Oh yea, that did it. You feel yourself just let go and this amount of pleasure and warmth rushes over you. It's so much that you moan out more expletives and his name repeatedly. After your high, you just see him. You need more, and god did you want to get more.

"Fuck me," You command, and he obliges. Pulling you closer to him, he uncovers his member, resting it on your stomach as he gets situated. He pulls a pillow and rests it under your lower back to make sure you don't hurt yourself, and keeping your ankles over his shoulders. You couldn't look away from him. Even his dick was freckled, which was kinda cute, but all you cared about was him and the fact you needed him in you.

"Are you ready?" He asks, noticing he has his dick in hand, ready to line himself up.

"Fuck, please," You groan, already closing your eyes in anticipation. He slides in, both of you moaning in pleasure.

"Holy shit, (Y/N)," he breathes out, barely over a whisper. His head is tilted back, holding onto your ankles. Your hands are by your lower stomach, trying to feel him in you from the outside because holy shit was he filling you full. He slowly starts to pump in and out of you, fully in, and fully out. Every pump in, you moan in delight. Sweat rolls down the both of you as you fill the room with heat and the sounds of pleasure. He starts to go faster, holding onto your thighs to bring you even closer.

"Cal~" You moan, holding your hands to your mouth because you knew you were about to get pretty loud. Without much thought, he pulls out and flips you onto your stomach. You push up onto all fours as he makes his way between your legs, entering you once more. Your arms give out, pushing your face into a pillow. This was helpful for covering your moans, but Cal wanted to hear them as he railed you. Carefully, he commanded the force to pull you up, by the neck. At first, only gently to not hurt you but to get up. You clenched in pleasure, moaning even louder. So, he also tightened his grip. Damn, so this is what he could do. After a bit more relentless railing, you felt your core have that same tightening sensation.

"Cal, I'm gunna-" You moan as he quickens the pace, causing you to moan out.

"Me too, fuck." He whispers out, nearing his release. Hearing him cuss like that over you sends you over as you scream out in delight. You clench onto him and release, an explosion of pleasure ruptures over yourself. His force lets go of you, making your head topple into the pillows. He grabs your hips and pushes him all the way, releasing into you. It's such a warm sensation, filling you up to the brim.You both stay like that for a few moments, catching your breathes. He pulls out, his cum leaking out of you.

"Holy shit," You say in unison. Cal chuckles, reaching for his towel that is on a nearby chair.

"Here, to clean up." He throws the towel onto your exposed behind. You blush, cleaning up yourself as you sit up on the towel, just in case. You cover yourself with his blanket, a sudden chill running all over you. Cal slips his boxers on from a nearby dresser and sits down beside you.

"I never thought we'd do that," You state, leaning into him. He happily wraps his arms around you.

"I'm glad we did, because wow. Jedi's are really missing out." This causing a laugh to escape you, causing him to also chuckle. You start to stand, but Cal holds you down.

"Stay tonight?" He asks, motioning to the pillows. He smiles warmly, and how could you say no? You return the smile, shuffling yourselves under the blankets and heads on pillows. He lays on his back as you cuddle up onto his chest, wrapping your arm around his torso. His arm lounges behind and around your back, rubbing it up and down.

"Well, we can do that as much as you want," You giggle, cuddling into him more.

"I'd like that, but also the cute romantic stuff." He chuckles, leaning down to kiss your head.

"Maybe a date?"

"I like the sound of that, in the morning?"

"Oh, let's go to the bakery down the street, I heard the have wonderful food." You smile, your eyelids feeling heavy.

"It's a date, goodnight (Y/N)." Cal whispers, closing his eyes. You hum back, already falling asleep. The smile never leaves your faces, even as you dream of what the future could hold for you two.

[evidenceof]

how do you do the coloring in your gifs? it's so pretty 🥰

this is such a huge compliment. thank you!! i'm glad you think so, considering this is my first whack at ~seriously doing it. coloring is my favorite step! i’ll be as helpful as i can, but if you find any of the tips too vague, feel free to dm me!

we’ll be using this webgott gif set you indicated as the guide! here are the before and after samples of the gifs so you see what we'll be tryna achieve from base to final frames:

for the steps, ill go over several things: a. Why I do this step: a.k.a. what i’m trying to achieve with each adjustment layer b. How I do this step: how i personally adjust the settings c. Before and after samples of the colors so you can see the progress after each of my steps

onward

this is my first time typing down a tutorial so please be kind. i am (very) new to all of this and most of what i learned, i’ve learned from reading a bunch of tutorials on here (that i’ll credit down below), and watching too many youtube videos on color adjusting digital images, and coloring old wwii photographs.

this answer will be focused on just how i personally color, but i’ve linked some guides for creating base gifs that i also studied.

! before anything else !

i use photoshop to create and color my gifs and mpv to capture my screencaps from my files. also this ISN’T the ONLY WAY and the BEST WAY to color. this is just how i personally go mad on photoshop. <3 

Coloring tutorials that have been super helpful in getting me on track:

dicom gifs - not technically a coloring tutorial, but this is how i import my scripts on to photoshop.the process feels smoother for me (no need to reverse the frames etc. and the resolution always looks and feels better when i'm done with them)

general coloring + hi res gifs - great place to start with tips on what files to use for maximum crispness

masking layers -  for when you only want to apply an adjustment layer to a specific part of your gif, great for skin tones!

STEP ZERO: know what you like

This sounds very “ok captain obvious” but i do think it’s such a vital part of the process. the technical stuff gets very tedious, very quickly. and if you don’t know what colors draw you in, what colors you’re trying to lift and see in your gifs, you’re going to be tinkering around with the settings for longer than you’d like. so have references ready, if that’s your jam.

and with that, i'd like to show you some examples of colors that i gravitate towards that greatly influence how i color my gifs. i'm a huge 40s technicolor girl, 35mm 60s film girl (see ernst lubitsch, powell and pressberger, jacques rivette, agnes varda). and because i’m coloring a piece of media set in WWII, 1940s, i like studying the colored photographs (think winnix chair photo in color).

so am always looking to punch up my reds and greens, deepen and add browns, saturate skin tones so there's warmth there, while grays/shadows tend to veer towards a cooler tone. 

sorry for the thick paragraphs under this but i think it’s very crucial! once you’ve got that down pat, or at least have some handy references with you, it’ll be less of a pain to go through the next steps.

My process/sequence of adjustment layers

Base DICOM Script → Curves → Levels (optional for me) → Color Balance →  Color Fill Layer → Hue and Saturation → Selective Color

What that looks like on Photoshop:

STEP 1: DICOM BASE SCRIPT

Why I do this step: These are your frames! This is also the part where you adjust the sharpness of the gif so you don’t get a blurry image after cropping it down to tumblr dimensions.

How I do this step: I use actions for my DICOM script. I used to do it manually but now I use this Good Good Action Scripts by Redbelles. Cuts down the time, arranges them in the timeline for me. And as I’ve mentioned, it just feels better for me.

If you’re using pngs/screencaps as your base script, you can follow the instructions here instead.

This is also the part where you can adjust you can play back the gif and see if you’re happy with the positioning of your crop. Your timeline will look something like this.

STEP 2: CURVES LAYER 

Why I do this step: i’m concerned with getting what i just label as "true color." you'll notice that with band of brothers especially, the more you look at the scenes, the more you'll just how a) yellow the daylight scenes are, b) how blue gray and nothing else the darker scenes are, c) the lighting can get muddy. 

personally, when I adjust curves, my goal is to try to get the image as neutral as possible, which then allows me to inject as much color as you see fit. So think of it as eliminating as much of the coloring the editors of the show placed into the scene, so that you end up what is essentially a blank canvas.

How I adjust my Curves Layer: I pick the high, mid, and low lights of the scene. This video goes into that in depth. But you can also just choose the auto options if you’re just, like me, concerned with getting the image as neutral as possible. For a while I did in manually to understand what it was meant to do. But if you want to do it easily do the following steps.

> Auto adjust - by clicking the hamburger icon/ the three lines on top.

> You can choose between “Enhance per Channel Contrast” or “Find Dark or Light Colors”. Make you you tick on the “Snap Channel Midtones” to get the most neutral image. The tool bar should look like this:

Let’s compare the frames with and without the Curve adjustment layer:

Great! We’ve gotten rid of some of the darker overlays on both their faces, see more contrast between the foreground and the background. This gives us a better base image to color in for the next steps.

STEP 3: COLOR BALANCE LAYER

Why I do this step: To me this is like underpainting but not really? It feels like that though.What it helps me do is to adjust the hue/dominant colors of the highlights, midpoints, and shadows. so let's say even at it's most "neutral" state, I still find the image too yellow or too red. At this point of the process, I’ll add more cyan. if i want the yellow to adjust into an orange/brown area, I add in a bit more magenta and adjust the greens. it's here where i decide if i want the shadows to lean more towards a cooler tone or a warmer tone. It helps you make these crucial adjustments before you go in with the Hue and Saturation layer. (This is where you knowing what colors you like, comes in immediately!)

How I do this Step:

> Add a Color Balance Layer

> Adjust the three points: I’ll exaggerate the Color Balance adjustment so you can see what points are being targeted by each hue adjustment and where you can add those colors under this step. The tones do bleed into each other, so adjust sparingly if you’re not going for a complete wash of color.

Midtones: Let’s you adjust the “middle” areas, i.e. some of the biggest chunks of the frame. See Web’s entire face, the gray wall in the back ground, his ODs

Shadows: Let’s you adjust the darkest parts of the frame. See his hair, the barrel of the M1, the darkest parts of his glove. 

Highlights: Let’s you adjust the colors of the the brightest parts of the photo. For this frame it’s Web’s forehead, and the very tips of his fingers.

Let’s compare the frames: With the Curve adjustment vs. Adding the Color Balance

You’ll notice that I’ve only nudged the tones a little bit here. The accompanying gif (Liebgott’s) has greener overtones, and I wanted to balance some of that hue in this set. 

Highlights: Wanted more brown tones. Nudged the arrows to add more red, green and justtt a small bit of blue.

Midtones: Nudged the arrows to have a touch more red and a touch more yellow to make the skin tone lean to a warmer hue.

Shadows: Needed this to be cooler so I nudged the arrows to give it a bit more Cyan, while still adding just a hint of yellow. Together they make the image a tinge more green.

Once I’m happy with this, I move on to the next step. You can go back to this step, of course! If you want to make adjustments after you’ve applied the next layers. <3 

STEP 4: LEVELS LAYER

Why I do this step: I use this in place of a Brightness and Contrast layer or Exposure Layer. This is where I reintroduce shadows and points of light. Here I can choose to add a bit more depth, or to reveal more of the shadowed points of the image. I don’t always move this around, and this is an optional step for me, but I did it for this gif set.

How I do this Step:

> Add Levels layer

> Adjust midpoint arrow to the right or left - this can lift any shadows if you move it towards the left, and deepen any shadows if you move it towards the right.

> Adjust the highlights arrow to the right - Optional as well. If you want to introduce/emphasize the brightness in the image, make the high points even whiter, you can slide this more to the left.

> ****I don’t adjust the bottom slider. This adds a “fade” into your image. If you want lesser contrast, and more of that flat quality, you can move this around but I barely touch this.

Let’s compare the frames: With previous adjustments vs. Adding the Levels Layer

Here, I deepened the contrast and shadows, I wanted more black in Web’s hair, and to give more depth to his ODs and gloves. The shadows also help define their features more prominently, better outline for both their eyes and nose. For Lieb, I lifted the shadows a bit to show more of his face, and see more of the redness of his lips that I love.

STEP 4: HUE AND SATURATION LAYER

Why I do this step: You’ve prepped your canvas! This is where everything’s sort of breathed into life. Spoiler alert, if you’re coloring Band of Brothers specifically, you’ll be moving the red and yellow a LOT, and rarely any of the other color layers since they are… non-existent in most frames. Here is where I give the skin more color, differentiate the shades of olive and green that’s prominent given that they’re soldiers. This is also where you’ll see the blue/green eyes pop out if the frame permits (Web, Winters, Bull, and Randleman’s eyes tend to reveal some blues and greens every now and then!)

Hue Area: Mixes your chosen color and adds more magenta or yellow.

Saturation Area: Dulls or Saturates said hues. 

If you move your arrow towards the extreme left, you get a dull green, if you move it to the right, you get highlighter green.

How I do this Step:

> Add Hue and Saturation Layer

> Open the drop down - I try not to move the ‘Master’ area because it washes the entire gif with hue and color. I’m only targeting specific areas and colors.

> Adjust Reds - I tend to make my reds lean more towards magenta. To do this I drag the arrow towards the left and inject some more magenta into the mix, not too much that they look sunburnt (though sometimes that’s inevitable. I’ll show you how to fix it later on!). I saturate the red a lot. As I’ve said, I love red lmfao. So I want that to be lifted in the image.

> Adjust Yellows - I also want my yellows to be a bit more orange in darker scenes where they’re seen mostly on skin. So I move the arrow again to the left.

> Adjust Greens - There’s green here huzzah! I wanted to lift the color a bit more from his uniform, make it more olive than a dark gray/brown, so I added more yellow by moving the arrow to the right and upping the saturation.

*Tip: If you’re unsure about which color you’re adjusting, you can take the dropper tool on the screenshot, click on the area of the frame you want to fix up, and it will register the prominent color.

Let’s compare the frames: With previous adjustments vs. Adding the Hue and Saturation Layer:

You’ll notice there’s a lot more pink on their faces, some reds on Web's fingertips, and a brighter, more prominent red on Lieb's lips. The color of their ODs is a bit more true to its name of olive drab now! The contrast of the added color to Web's skin also makes his eye color pop out more. Their skin looks alive! Yay!

STEP 5: SELECTIVE COLOR LAYER

Why I do this step: I think of this as finishing touches. Sometimes I find that I want to adjust the reds, yellows, etc. more specifically and I can mix in more color to get it to the exact tone I want. This is where I can do that. Selective color lets you add or remove more cyan, magenta, and yellow tones from your hues.

How I do this Step:

> Add Selective Color Layer

> Open the drop down and choose which hue you’ll be adjusting

> Adjust the colors accordingly- I don’t use it in this specific gif, so here’s a different one of Harry in Carentan. I adjusted the reds and yellows to have more cyan (moving arrow to on the Cyan scale to the left), making the red more purple, and the yellow more green. It’s VERRRY subtle, but it matters greatly to me lmfao. 

STEP 6: COLOR FILL LAYER

Why I do this step:  I really... love browns and warmer skin tones, even if they're right smack in the middle of Bastogne (lawl sorry!!!!!). band of brother's footage in particular, if i only adjust the skin tone at the hue and saturation level, there will be parts of the skin that register as white or gray (i.e. technically not hues) and not "red" or "yellow", what that means is, even if you adjust the saturation and hue and amp it up to the highest level those patches of white and gray will remain white and gray and you'll be left with patchy soldier skin. sure, it's realistic but i want warm skin! 

How I do this step:

> Add Color Fill Layer: Click the Circle symbol that's half white, half black. Select "Solid Color"

> Choose a color: I gravitate towards a light brown or a light orange. Click okay and don’t panic when your entire image is covered by a solid block of color.

> Play with Blend Mode and Opacity: I usually use Linear/Color Burn which allows me to see warmer colors overall but especially, and most importantly for me, their skin. The end result is giving them the TINIEST bit of a tan but also introducing more natural color against the grays and whites that register. Less patchy skin on you WWII vet!

You can tinker with the opacity and blend modes to see which looks best for you.

Let’s go back to Web and compare the frames: With previous adjustments vs. Adding the Color Fill Layer:

Tada!

Now all that's left is to transform them back into frames on the Timeline (see linked tutorials above!) and save.

And that’s more or less how I color my gifs! I tinker a lot with the layers after. Sometimes you need to see it all together and then make the adjustments after. I do more of some steps, and less of some depending on the frames and the scenes.

Having a good grasp of color language helps a lot and it’s something you do end up learning while making gifs or just looking at images/media whose colors call to you.

Sort of as an end note/exercise, you can see what it is about the color and lighting of The Pacific that draws you in, and amplify that in your gifs. Perhaps you’re drawn to the orange of the sun, or the bright almost jewel green of the tropical foliage. Maybe you’re really into the browns and the dusty scenes. It all helps you pick out what you want to ramp up and tone down in the colors.

I hope this was… even a tiny bit helpful. Again, feel free to DM me or hit me up on Discord if you want some clarifications/if you need help WHILE you’re making the gifs. Happy to help! <3 

[cal-kestis]

Hi, Nik! I hope you are doing well! If it's okay with you, I have a question about your Pedro birthday edit.How did you get pictures to overlay with the gifs? I'm familiar with gif overlay efect, but this is the first time I've seen an image and gif overlay. It looks so cool. Best wishes.

hi there! getting this effect is super easy! you're simply adding an image layer above your gif and its adjustment layers. since you're familiar with gif overlays, I'm going to assume you're asking how to create a cutout (aka erase the image's background) in order to make that image appear as though it's on top of the gif like this:

there are a few methods for creating an image cutout (click and zoom for a better view). more info below the cut:

in the tool bar, the lasso and selection tools are the 3rd and 4th, and they're nested (so you have to right click the tools to see the other options):

first, let me say: the image you choose will greatly determine how simple or annoying it is to cut the subject. if you find a high-quality image with a solid, high-contrast background, making a cutout will be a breeze. if the background is busy and the edges are fuzzy, it'll be a bit more challenging.

my personal fav tool in most cases is the Quick Selection tool because I find it's, well, quick. you just click a bunch of times until everything you want is outlined by the dotted line. and it works well for both images with solid backgrounds and busy backgrounds. but here's a short explanation of each tool:

Magic Wand: automatically detects a portion of your image using "machine learning" to approximate a selection (a bit too finicky for detailed images or ones with low contrast between the subject and background for me)

Object Selection: allows you to draw a rectangle or ellipse around the subject and automatically detects the selection (I've only used this once, but you can see in the image above, it did a pretty good job! that was just one click)

Quick Selection: my fav! you can adjust the brush size and continually click your subject until the dotted line is outlining it fully

Magnetic Lasso: haphazardly draw a line around your subject and this tool will smart-detect the edges and "snap" anchor points around your subject like a magnet. it's relatively accurate except around finer details like hair

Polygonal Lasso: the most manual and, therefore, my least favorite of the options (hence why I didn't finish it in the example above lol). you have to click all around the subject to connect the dots. not fun for subjects with lots of curves and crevices (at least not for me)

whatever option you choose, the most important part for perfecting the selection is the "Select and Mask..." tool in the upper toolbar:

this tool opens a new panel where you can refine the selection and see the effects in real time. I don't have any go-to numbers for this, it's all about tinkering with the sliders until you're happy with it. but I usually play with everything except Feather because I want sharp edges.

in the gif below, I used the Refine Hair tool (which refines the selection around the hair automatically), moved the sliders very minimally because my selection using Quick Selection was already pretty decent. then, I'm showing you the effects of Shift Edge. increasing it pushes the selection outward, creating a sort of buffer. this could be good if you want to go in later with a layer mask and manually erase some parts yourself. decreasing Shift Edge pulls the selection in tighter. I wouldn't recommend decreasing too much as this can cut off too much of your subject:

once you're happy, click OK and you'll come back to your normal screen with the dotted lines. simply use the Command+J shortcut to duplicate your selection — leaving you with the original image and a layer with only the cutout. from there, you can add a black and white background to check if you missed any bits, and then use a layer mask and black brush to erase them:

then, just like you would if you were overlaying a gif, add the image layer ABOVE your gif and adjustment layers, and color the image separately if needed. you can also choose to add the image above or below your text layers if you have any. in my case, the image is above the text:

sorry this isn't as organized as my usual tutorials, but I hope it answers your question and helps nonetheless! :)

[the-mother-of-lions]

Hi, I’m new to gif making and I was wondering if you would please post a colouring tutorial for any gifset you’re working on right now?

sure!

this is the set i used these for

I was thinking about giving you a psd to look at as well but tbh its better if you learn to do the process yourself instead of relying on psd's made by other people. I'm a little old school in that regard, repetition is the key to remembrance and practice makes perfect and all that.

So I'm working on an OPLA Zoro/Luffy set right now which I guess kind of works out for you since I have to do more work recoloring live action scenes.

So I've made my gifs, I've cropped them to 540x540.

Each gif will get two Smart Sharpen (Filters>Sharpen>Smart Sharpen) smart filters. It's important that you do them in this order or it will look different. The first and second filter, respectively -

Amount: 500% Radius: 0.3px Amount: 10% Radius: 10px

You can adjust these as you'd like, but I personally don't do that. I know some giffers add Gaussian Blurs or Surface Blurs, but I like my gifs to be as crisp and clean as possible, I don't want any blur on them.

From that you can start to color. Since I'm doing overlays for this set, I'm going to get that set up first and then I'll start on the coloring. I'm not going to explain how to do overlays in this tutorial just because it's a long explanation. I do have a tutorial for Photopea that I will link at the bottom. The process is mostly the same with some minor variances.

So the first gif I'm recoloring is pretty dark. Both gifs on it are dark, so I'm going to relight them separately with a Curves layer. When using Curves, I use the eyedroppers to show PS which two points of white and black I want the gif balanced between. So with the white eyedropper selected, I click on a white point of the gif and with the black eyedropper I click on a dark point of the gif. This is going to relight your gif and is one of the most important steps in coloring gifs.

I don't always get it right the first try and I usually click around a bit and try different points of white/black before I find something I like the best.

Next I'm going to add a Hue/Saturation layer with the Saturation at 10 and a Vibrance layer with the Vibrance at 30. I use these as base points and I'll recolor the rest of my gif after doing these.

I don't love how red Mackenyu is now so I'm going to add a Hue/Sat layer and switch to the Red panel and set the Saturation to -10 and the Lightness to -5.

My personal rule of thumb when adjusting the skin tone of my actors and characters of the Global Majority is to do it in increments with the H/S no more than -30 and I usually set the Lightness to half of whatever the H/S is. But of course this is just what I do and if something else works better for you, please do that.

From here I'm going to do the rest of the heavy adjusting:

Color Balance > Tone: Shadows Cyan / Red: +10

Selective Color > Red Cyan: +50

Selective Color > Black Black: +5

Brightness/Contrast Brightness: +10

Selective Color > Magenta Magenta: -50

Vibrance Vibrance: +30

And for now, I'm done with this gif and I'm going to move on to the others in the set.

One of the other gifs is really bright, its made up of a day time scene. My coloring on this will be really different than the night scenes.

The same base layers: Curves, Hue/Sat, Vibrance I'm also going to put the same Hue/Sat red adjustment layer here because I don't want Kiki and Mack to be too red.

Color Balance > Shadows Cyan - Red: +10 Yellow - Blue: +10

Selective Color > Cyan Cyan: +50 Yellow: -50

Selective Color > Black Black: +10

Brightness/Contrast Brightness: -10

Selective Color > Yellow Yellow: -20

Vibrance +30

Honestly anon, once I got more comfortable with PS my coloring process is more varied. I go by vibes more often than not. And actually, I did all this work and then changed my mind once I got all the gifs done and ended up making most of them black and white.

But I hope this helped you! If you have any more questions you're welcome to ask.

My DMs are also open, I can help a little more specifically that way, and you can ask for my Discord and we can chat there if it's easier.

Good luck anon!

Overlay Tutorial with Photopea

[kimeoshi]

‘Twas both 👁👁, but yeah honestly I’m very interested cause damn- (sorry if I seem awkward I’m not good with online interaction 😭😭 LMAO)

NAH no worries you're doing fine!!

It's a pretty wide array of topics but touching the surface of it, I'll go into my art process.

Here's a short thread where I went into this similarly!

I pretty much follow the steps of what I mentioned there, but it varies a little bit based on the style I go for too: painting whole illustrations or design or more simple fun things.

I could describe what I did in each frame of my process gifs which I've posted before but I would need some time. With big pieces, the steps I go by (read slowly, it's a pretty dense text):

thumbnailing -> sketching with bigger shapes to get the line of action/feel (that is, I'm just blocking out the composition) -> refine that a bit -> hide BG, draw the characters (lineart) and add the base colors of them. (then merge & rasterize a copy of it for later) -> put them back in the environment (unhide BG), make them grey -> add shading in greyscale style (multiply layers, glow dodge layers, you name it) -> get that previous rasterized layer back and put it on color mode -> those characteristic shiny parts get a new layer with overly saturated + high brightness colors -> color BG with a new color layer -> then rendering/refining for concerning amounts of time -> add effects and change color/brightness/contrast curves + gradient map -> profit???

For software, I generally use Paint Tool SAI (I adore blending/painting here), I use Clip Studio Paint for the 3D posing library/sketching/lineart, and Photoshop for final effects. (Update: I mostly do all things in CSP now)

(if you have CSP, try out this brush... it saved my life)

As for improvement:

I experiment, watch a lot of youtube videos (I personally like the ones which analyse an artist). I suggest thoroughly understanding how something moves and works (for anatomy I can recommend the book 'Anatomy for Sculptors'), I also study and jot down important pieces of advice or insights to a collective document, rather than saving them to my device where it is highly likely to be forgotten.

I believe if you put great importance on colors and composition, that can cause the most noticeable, 'fastest' improvement, at least if you view it from the lens of social media. (While online environments provide significant reassurance, it must be engaged with in moderation, as it is easy to fall into a lot of negative mindsets, taking the enjoyment out by perfectionism, comparison, or seeking validation, etc.)

Another improvement technique you can try is to slow down a speedpaint video of your choice and follow along with the artist. Extremely useful, I recommend, put your artist under a microscope.

Of course I don't do all of these things every single waking hour, it's just a side hobby to my unrelated studies in real life. Even if you don't actively draw your visual library and knowledge can improve passively, I find that so fascinating. I don't touch a paper for months and there's a sudden jump, like damn what. (Not saying you should do this, active learning is still better ofc) Either way my point with that is, that improving does and did take a lot of time for me as well.

Apologies if this goes all over the place, I tried to touch upon every subject that came to mind at the moment, in not too much in detail, overall I hope it makes sense

If you have any specific questions related, feel free to ask! Or if there's any specific problem you'd like to tackle but find yourself lost, same applies!

[jinjjayo]

hi! i noticed you said you were fairly new to making gifs, and i'm also kind of new and still struggling on how to make the quality crisp/how to get good coloring. is it possible for you to provide some advice / tips for me?

ah hello !! yes, i started last year spring but i'm feeling a lot more confident these days so hopefully i'll have some insights that are of use to you 💜

i yapped a lot, so i'm putting most of this under a readmore

first: tutorials are your friend. gifmakers sharing things are your friend! we gotta look out for each other lmao. how else will we keep our timeconsuming hobby on dying website alive. try to find resource blogs like usergif tutorials section or these sorts of things. im sure lots of us muddled our way through like that. if you have a favorite gifmaker see if they have like a photoshop help or a ref tag, too, that's nice (i dont on this blog, but lots of folks do)

second: quality generally is going to be a lot bit down to your source video. u can sharpen and do everything you like to 480p and it will still be 480p you know? so for kpop, most mvs and that kinda stuff will be in 4k which you can download from youtube and that's nice enough. if you want to have better you can look for masters (which i do, i have a huge list of hoarded mvs). for performances ideally you want either like nice 1080p .ts files or uhd - there are places you can look for that like on twitter or on different sites. basically you want to use the nicest you can get (that wont brick your computer - 4k can be troublesome for this reason sometimes)

third: once you have nice quality video source, a lot of crispiness and prettiness is down to individual sharpen settings and coloring, especially contrast and white balance. curves tool is your friend for fixing tints/white balance/contrast. here's a good sharpen actions set from my mutual @/sugurugetos (and thats her resource blog so it may be worthwhile to poke around in there). i use a combination of my own sharpen settings + photoshop camera raw filter most of the time.

(aside: there are some other more complicated things you can do to nice-ify your footage, like vaporsynth/avisynth or handbrake or topaz upscale or whatever, and im here to tell you i dont use any of those things and i still make it out okay hehe. but there are many tutorials for them too if you like)

fourth: it is a learning curve like any other creative hobby so give it time & keep trying hehe. most gifmakers have their own style of coloring/sharpening and yours will become more apparent once you figure out how you like to do it. i believe in u

[usernyoom]

hey I love your edits and I was just wondering what you use/do to edit your photos? Not to copy, just in awe!

omggg thank you anon!!! the fact u want to know at all means so much 😭💓 especially when theres so many people posting edits that have a much better understanding of how to edit photos than me!!! (may i direct you to the amazing @yesloulou and her gifs..) ask me anything im happy to share and for u to copy my techniques (??) send me any other questions u have if i dont answer them i cud talk abt this all day .. 🫶🫶

so! i use the mobile version of lightroom when im editing photos quickly e.g. on race day, and tbf, its my main editing app. if that doesnt click with u, theres also snapseed which is a google editing app that i also used for a while until i realised lightroom was free (a blessing 😭). I also sometimes use photopea as a rip-off photoshop if i want to do more crazy stuff 🤪🤪🤪

first thing is crop the image if it needs it. i have a preference for portrait photos, just bc i prefer the way they look when posted. i use all sorts of ratios, but my favourites are 3:4 and 5:4 just bc i think they work best with driver portraits! (hot tip: the rule of thirds is soooo helpful!! find a metaphorical 'line' through the photo and line that up with one of the thirds) (lightroom produces the grid automatically when u crop xxx)

the next thing i do with a photo is correct the lighting and colouring. there are plenty of tutorials online and i can go more indepth if u want, but i tend to favour lower contrast with low highlights (bc i hate when u lose detail in highlights. the bane of my existence). its usually the first thing i try, but if it looks horrible i'll try different things. to correct colouring, i use the tint/temperature sliders (im still learning how to intuitively use these rather than messing around and going hm. too purple right before i post). since most of the photos i edit r taken by super talented F1 photographers i rarely have to use curves, but sometimes i do! so i do that as well before i get into the meat of it if needed 😌

then i adjust the tint/temperature & vibrance and saturation until i'm getting the vibe i want (e.g. i love making max photos cooler toned). then i use colour mix to change anything specific about colours in the image (i most commonly use this to make daniel/charles' skin less yellow and more red toned, to soften any redness or to make max's blush pink). then i colour grade!

after that i decide whether the image needs sharpening, extra texture or dehazing, and then i add grain! i prefer a rough, understated grain so that you dont lose loads of the detail from the photo. here's some examples of before and afters of some of my more complex edits:

-> this one was lighting correction and colour correction! i also used curves im pretty sure 😭

-> exposure and contrast changes and colour changes/grading (can we appreciate this photo.. wow)

-> made photo brighter (pretty sure i lowered the highlights..) n changed the temperature of the photo

i hope this helps!!!! if anyone wants me to do like a proper adjustment by adjustment type thing send me an ask and i will do!!! thank you so much kind anon 💖🫵

[orangesyellow]

Hi! Would you mind making a colouring tutorial? Your control over colours is so impressive! The way you always know how to make vibrant background colours while keeping the skin tones perfectly pigmented. I’m sorry for leaving such a bothersome request :( I always feel lost when it comes to colouring because I never quite achieve the result I have in mind and I don’t really know what setting to modify.

HI! It's not bothersome at all! I do have an old tutorial up about how I color my picspams and I use the same method for gifs so for fear of sounding like a broken record, it might be more useful to check that out here. ^.^

a little more thoughts about the bear edit (i'm assuming this is the post you're referring to, please feel free to correct me if i'm wrong) + if there is something specific you're looking for, it might be easier for me to answer:

scene choices - never underestimate what i'm willing to sacrifice for the color i am aiming for. i wanted the gifset blue so these scene choices were chosen specifically for blue backgrounds with little movement. with that, i sacrificed the # of frames, other scenes that might have matched the lyrics better, other scenes that i thought were prettier but I knew i wouldn't be able to get the blue i wanted etc.

masking layers - this works really well in combination of choosing scenes with very minimal movement. i was only able to bring out the blue in this gif bc carmy didn't move at all. which meant i was able to create a new layer > color the background in > set to soft light > erase parts i didn't like such as blue that covered faces

adjustment settings - as for which layers to edit, i always go through selective colors, color balance, brightness, and curves. with selective colors, if you're not willing to learn color theory (like me bc i'm lazy) then it just comes with messing around with the sliders. for instance, there's a lot of white in the original scenes of those gifs and i know that if i use selective coloring > white > the whites can be turned cyan. then i add another selective coloring > cyan > and ramp up the cyans in there. i also duplicate selective coloring layers multiple times. sometimes i'll end up with 3 of the same layers just to get a vibrant blue. this is how i achieved the blues for this gif. now, i would go back to those layers and use the mask layer to erase all the blues i don't like over carmy & syd.

TLDR; i use a lot of brushing backgrounds and setting those on different modes (soft light, multiply, darken, etc..). i then will brush out all the areas i don't like (over faces, clothes, if it makes a section too grainy). then to enhance the color, i use selective layers. note that you can select for multiple colors in one layer, i personally do it one by one. (ex. if i'm trying to edit the cyan, i just do one layer of cyan and not edit the other colors in the drop down and duplicate to my desire). then finally, a color balance layer to tie it all back together.

[fandomfluffandfuck]

Lmao, perhaps 💀💀 Personally, for unrelated oral fixation reasons, I constantly have gum on me. If not, I will chew the inside of my lip and cheek to shreds, lol.

Me as I am LITERALLY doing the same while reading your reply lkjhgfdda

yep yep yep!!! I love that post with all my heart!!

nowadays i'm looking into older cevans characters and Bryce Langley is 👁️‍🗨️👁️‍🗨️👁️‍🗨️ he's so unhinged and yet so pretty

I love ao3 but ao3 is currently not serving me the Bryce content I NEED ,_, really having a moment of dang if I want it do I need to write it on my own??? can't the words just appear on paper from my brain???

kinda related but not really related but kinda related; how does one get into writing smut?

I've read a lot of smut, and I have thoughts about the plot and stuff if I were to write it, but whenever I try I just feel like I'm being too... Cringe? I just can't get myself to write it like how it's happening in my mind, and I'm constantly thinking of the "He would not fucking say that. No one would say that. Do you know how real people talk?" post. :P

Hope you have an awesome day!! 🤍

— 🔪 anon

related to this

Lmao, I love that for us 💀💀

Pumpkin Spice Chris Evans--Byrce. Yes! It's the perfect time for his pretty, tiny, young era, lmao.

Ohh, yeah, I can't imagine there's a ton of written stuff out there for him, though. I barely see gif sets and such of him, so that would track 👀

I would certainly say go for it, though! If you want that content, be the content!

Fuck 👏🏻 yes 👏🏻

As far as how to get into writing smut...

I would say just do it!! It's scary, it really is, but you can do it! There's some amount of learning curve to it, as there is with any skill--writing included--but the only way to figure out where you are on the learning curve is to do it. If you hate it so much, you don't have to publish it anywhere. No one has to see it. That's the beauty. It's for you first and foremost.

I started writing smut after an ex-girlfriend (girlfriend at the time, lol) introduced me to the world of fandom and then to fanfiction. (The longer story is basically that I wrote her some erotic poetry about the sex we had been having for part of her birthday gift, and she was like, this is good. Really good. Are you aware that people Do This? Publicly? For others to enjoy? I was not aware, lmao.) I didn't get into it right, right away, I did a ton of reading of fanfiction and smut first, but eventually, I just started to do it. I honestly don't remember why exactly I started other than I've always loved writing, and I started to become obsessed with Marvel more and more, thanks to being in a fandom, so... why not write for fandom? At the time, I had no idea what I was doing, and looking back, compared to the shit that I write now, you can tell 😅 but that's okay! It's okay if I think the stuff I wrote at first is shit and find embarrassment in those stories now. You know why? Because it means I'm better at it now. I had to start somewhere to get somewhere. Also, hey, there are people out there who've read those first fanfictions I wrote and who appreciate that work exactly for what it is. Many times, I have considered going back and orphaning early works of mine or re-writing/re-editing them. But I haven't. Partly (truthfully) because that takes a lot of time (especially re-working early fanfics), but mostly because I have learned to appreciate in other writers, whether they create fanfiction or otherwise, seeing them evolve. Their voice may mature or become "better" or more developed, but I can read their voice in their words throughout, and I think that's beautiful. I would love to see that in my works eventually. I would love to be that for someone else.

What has made my writing better has not only been continuing to learn how to better communicate what I want to convey to readers through my words but also how to ebolish those cringe barriers. What do I want to write? Filthy, nasty shit [affectionate]. Okay, well, pull no punches. Put in the obscene details. Paint a picture that would make a prude squirm in their seat and have to close their browser. I, like most people in the US, grew up with some amount of puritanical views on sex and sexuality. I am still unlearning those. I feel I had a head start, being kinky because I have to accept those parts of my own sexuality. When I first began writing smut, there were many more unconscious filters. Those filters, I found in my own writing, to be the most cringy. That and bad grammar. But, hey, English is fucked. Write how you wanna write. People don't speak with perfect grammer. Language is a sandbox, play.

[alicentive]

hi ☺️👋 love chu💕 ❤️ I'm really new to gif making too for my favorite shows so I hoped to ask how you make the backgrounds look so smooth in your gifs?I'd appreciate any advice, it's just for practice. thank you if you answer in advance ❤️💕

Hello hello, and big love right back at ya! 💕😊

How exciting that you’re new to gifmaking – it’s so much fun to get to experiment with that and try all sorts of things. I learned a lot from following tutorials or talking with other gifmakers back when I first started out, and I’m definitely still learning new things now.

I think it’s a combination of factors that makes the background in my gifs so smooth? So I’m going to talk about some of those factors and show you a few things and hopefully that’ll help! I use Photoshop CS6 for gifmaking, but I think the majority of this advice also holds up in other versions haha.

First off, I always try to use video files of the 1080p variety. You can gif with videos that have 720p, too, but 1080p will provide a smoother and clearer image because there are more pixels in 1080p. (There’s also 2160p, which is even higher resolution, but I’ve personally found that unwieldy to screencap and 1080p looks very good already!) This is the technical reason why the gifs look smooth: work with a high resolution video and get better results, that’s just how it is.

Another technical thing is the type of scene you pick to gif. When the scene is very busy with a lot of people and objects coming into focus at once (group shots, shots in heavily decorated rooms, etc), there’s very little in the scene that actually fades into the background focus-wise. With close-ups of a single face, the focus is entirely on the face and the background will fade to some degree. This really has to do with how the show’s made, like how the director and camera people and everyone else chose to portray/film the scenes. As a gifmaker, you can always choose to crop some things out of the scene when you want the focus to be on a specific thing – you’re essentially choosing a new focus for the viewer in that case. But yeah, overall, the way it’s filmed affects everything else about the gif.

Now, onward to the actual Photoshop things…

When I gif, I also sharpen the gif itself. This will make some details pop more and help move the focus to where I want it to be most, which is usually either a face or something important happening in the scene. I do think it might affect how you see the background as well – when everything in the foreground is sharpened, the background will naturally have a bit of blurriness to it. I have a sharpening action I use for every gif, but I believe its settings are as follows.

This is Filter -> Smart Sharpen by the way.

First Smart Sharpen:

And the second Smart Sharpen (yes we do it twice!):

Most importantly, I think the way you choose to brighten and color the gif will affect how the background will look. A show like House of the Dragon unfortunately can be very dark, so the urge to brighten it and fix the filters they put on these scenes is immense. 😂 But it’s also really easy to brighten it too much with that urge to see what’s going on, lol, and that’s when the background’s going to look grainy or pixelated! So it’s always a fine balancing act and a lot of trial and error (seriously, the undo-button is my best friend) when working with scenes like these.

There are a few ways you can brighten a gif. My preferred method is with the Curves layer, but I also use Exposure and Gradient Map as additions to that sometimes. Mostly when a scene is so dark that I have to take care not to render it too pixelated by adjusting the Curves, really. When a gif gets too tricky, I use all three. 😂 Below are some basics of each layer, but it’s really about trying and clicking and trying and clicking and trying and… you get the picture, lol.

Curves

The little eye dropper tools I marked with white – grey – black in the picture below are the most important. Select the white eye dropper and click on the section of the gif that’s closest to white (but not fully white). Then, select the grey eye dropper and click on the gif section that’s either beige or grey or at least in that neutral color zone. Finally, select the black eye dropper tool and click on the darkest part of your gif. You should see immediate results, but it tends to take me a few tries to get the best version! It’s not uncommon for me to zoom in on an image to, like, 600% just to see which pixels I should be clicking. This takes patience, haha!

Exposure

Use it sparingly, cos it’s going to be an asshole about how bright it makes some things. My settings typically are:

Exposure: between 0,13 and 0,22 (this brightens certain areas)

Offset: -0,0009 or -0,0019 (please don't forget to add the - to the numbers, this will deepen the black areas a bit)

Gamma Correction: 1,04 (I’ve found it ‘marries’ the light and dark parts a tad more and makes it look more natural)

Gradient Map

Gradient map my beloveddd. It doesn’t always do the thing, but sometimes it really helps me add a bit of color correction or helps me lighten a certain part of a scene a bit more. Be careful with it, though, as using it too much might make the gif a bit grainy/pixelated (and we don’t want that). There are a few different ways you can use it, but my favorite way is the only good thing TikTok ever taught me (I’m old as dirt, y’all) and that’s this in a nutshell…

Add the layer and click on the gradient itself.

Now, this is going to make the gif look scary as heck but bear with me? Select Noise, uncheck Restrict Colors. Click OK. Don’t cry.

Go to the Opacity of your Gradient Map layer and set it to a percentage between 2% and 5%. Dry your tears.

If it’s not to your taste, go back into the gradient map itself by clicking on it again and selecting the nifty Randomize button you see on the screencap. Click and click and click until you find something that makes the gif sing.

Soooo. Very long story short, all of the above is going to contribute to how a gif looks and to how smooth the background is. I hope some of it is helpful to you! 💕 (And if anything’s unclear, please ask!! I know I get a little wordy and technical about some of the giffing sometimes, haha.)

[goodgifswithfreetoolschallenge]

TUTORIAL 3

Making Gifs Purely with FFmpeg Scripts

FULL TUTORIALS | RECOLORED GIFS

Directly opposite to the last tutorial, this tutorial is for girls who LOVE command lines. You can make a goddamned motherfucking pristine, RECOLORED gif set from your command line, and feel cool as fuck while you're at it. And doing so is probably not quite as devoid of visual stimulus as you think!!

FULL SIZE EXAMPLE SET HERE | FULL CODE FOR THE SET HERE

Operating systems: Mac, Windows, and Linux

Quality potential: High

Software needed: FFmpeg

Difficulty: Advanced as far as gif-making, but this is actually a good first bash scripting project in my opinion if you've ever wanted to learn how.

Requirements: General familiarity with your computer's shell (Powershell on Windows, Terminal on Mac) helps a lot! I will try to make it as easy as possible to follow.

LIMITATIONS: 1) Frame by frame gif-making methods take up a lot of space on your drive in the interim. 2) The captioning method currently provided in the tutorial is not good for longer captions (there is a better method I plan to append eventually). 3) Recoloring options are minimal in this tutorial. Curves and many other color adjustments are available in FFmpeg but I haven't yet explored them.

First, let me get this response out of the way:

"I don’t understand how I can possibly do this if I can’t see what I’m doing!"

That’s the neat part—you DO get to see what you’re doing!

The first visual is your file browser.

If you were using Photoshop or GIMP to make these gifs, you’d view all of your frames in a sidebar as small thumbnails and select and scroll through them to add delete, and group select and manipulate them. The FRAMES folder in our file browser will serve this function, letting us see every frame in our set, delete any frames we don't want, and group them to apply the same crop, coloring, or caption to the same selection of frames.

The second visual is provided by FFplay.

FFplay is part of FFmpeg. When you use this command in your system shell, it opens an image or gif so you can see the results of a crop, recolor, caption (or all three!) on your work before actually applying it! This is how we will actually see, at full resolution on our screen, exactly how our image is looking.

WINDOWS USERS: CHANGE ALL FORWARD SLASHES IN THIS SCRIPT TO BACK SLASHES!!!

___________________________________________

1. Installing FFmpeg

___________________________________________

I recommend you install via Homebrew if you're on Mac or Linux by pasting this into your terminal (if/once Homebrew is installed):

brew install ffmpeg

Windows users or other users who don't want Homebrew can follow directions on the FFmpeg website.

___________________________________________

2. Screencapping Frames with FFmpeg

___________________________________________

There are many ways to do this. However, since this is the Pure FFmpeg tutorial, I'm going to point you to these instructions on how to automate this process with a script template I have already written for you and an example (screencapping for this exact set).

If you follow that tutorial exactly, you should come back for step 3 with a folder on your Desktop called FRAMES.

___________________________________________

3. Organize in the FRAMES Folder

___________________________________________

Go to your FRAMES folder in your file browser. Your frames are already ordered for you in the correct time sequence.

Delete any unwanted frames.

I need to "trim" some frames from the beginning and end of my set. For example, at the beginning of my set, the first 17 screencaps are of Sam from the first 564 milliseconds of the start of the 8.02 time stamp. I don't want this these frames in my gifset. I want my first gif to start on Dean when he appears starting in the 18th screencap.

If I hold shift and select all of the unwanted frames, I can delete them. Similarly, my screencaps end at the 8:11 mark, and only the first 156 milliseconds are on Dean. After that, the shot switches back to the purple guy. I don't want those shots of the purple guy, so I'll delete frames 247 through 280 at the end of the set, leaving me with frame_0018.png through frame_0246.png as all the frames of my gifset.

Make "Shot Folders".

As an example of what I mean by shots, look at the three example gifs at the top of the tutorial. The first gif has just one shot (i.e., the camera stays on Dean). The second gif has two shots (the camera is on the guy painted purple, and then it's on Dean again. In the third gif, there are two shots again—one on Sam, then one on Dean. So that's 5 shots. I want to separate frames belonging to each of the 5 shots into subfolders labeled 1 through 5 (see gif below).

______________________________

4. Setting up FFplay

______________________________

Now that we have all of our frames organized, we want to set up FFplay—the method we'll use to view our image manipulations before applying them.

NOTE: Type down all of the commands as you run through this whole tutorial!! In a word document, a text editor, etc. Do NOT just type your commands in the shell without keeping track of what you typed! You can also see an example of how to map out your scripts by following how I wrote them for Github here, and even download/copy paste my fulls script there and use it as a template for your own set.

Template for Creating Our Preliminary Gifs for FFplay

The first thing we need to do is make a preliminary test gif of every shot in our gifset. To do this, use the template below, changing only the parts in red:

cd ~/Desktop/FRAMES/ShotNumber ffmpeg -start_number FileNumberOnFirstFrame -i frame_%04d.png -vf "fps=30" ffplay -vf Test.gif

The first line, beginning with "cd", tells me the file path to my shot folder where my frames are located.

The line below that combines the frames of my shot into a gif called Test.gif.

ffmpeg envokes the FFmpeg utility.

-start_number FileNumberOnFirstFrame -i frame_%04d.png tells FFmpeg to order the frames in the gif by the 4-digit number at the end of their file name, starting with FileNumberOnFirstFrame, which you should replace with the 4-digit number in the file name of the first frame in your shot folder.

-vf "fps=30" tells FFmpeg I want the gif to move at 30 frames per second (if you screencapped at a rate other than 30 FPS, you can simply change the number to match your frame rate).

In my example:

Say I want to generate a gif of my first shot. Then I need ShotNumber to be 1, and FileNumberOnFirstFrame to be 0018 (that's the 4-digit number on the first frame in my first shot, after deleting the first 17 frames). So my command looks like this:

cd ~/Desktop/FRAMES/1 ffmpeg -start_number 0018 -i frame_%04d.png -vf "fps=30" Test.gif

See Step 4 in my script on Github to see the script for all 5 shots.

Playing a gif from FFplay

Now if I want to play the gif I just made in FFplayer. I just type the following:

ffplay -loop 0 Test.gif

A window should pop up and loop through my gif (edit: I have adjusted this tutorial so the FFplay gif loops infinitely, by adding the setting -loop 0).

After repeating the above commands to generate a Test.gif in every shot folder, we're ready to move on to the rest of the steps.

__________________

5. Test Crop

_________________

Now that FFplay is set up, it's time to start manipulating our shots by applying changes to Test.gif in every shot folder. The first thing we want to do is crop.

NOTE 1: Cropping is different from scaling. At the very end of the tutorial, when we export, we will scale our gifs down to 540 px. For now, we want to work in full resolution, which for Supernatural is 1080p.

NOTE 2: Throughout this tutorial, when I add to an existing command, I will bold the new portion, and mark all the parts you can/should change in red.

Cropping Template

To crop a gif in FFplay, we add -vf  "crop=w:h:x:y" to our FFplay command as follows:

cd ~/Desktop/FRAMES/ShotNumber ffplay -vf  "crop=w:h:x:y" -loop 0 Test.gif

Where

w is the width you want your cropped frames to be (in pixels)

h is the height you want your cropped frames to be (in pixels)

x and y are coordinates of the top left corner of your crop selection (in pixels)

To understand the x and y coordinates, think about if you wanted to use crop an image in a drawing software. You would generally select your crop tool, start in the top left corner, and drag your cursor down and right (blue dot in the illustration below represents where the crop starts in an example). So FFmpeg asks you to specify the top left corner where your crop starts with an x and y coordinate (in pixels), and uses the w and h variables to determine how large the crop should be.

My frames are all 1920x1080 pixels. I would like my gifset to be square—1080x1080 pixels. So I already know I want my w and h to both be 1080. Since I want to start my crop at the top of a frame, losing no height, my y-coordinate (height to start my crop from) should also 1080. My x-coordinate is the only think I'm not sure about. I only know it needs to be bigger than 0 (0 would start my crop on the left edge) and smaller than 960, which would be the midway point.

So what am I going to do? ...I'm gonna make an educated guess of what x-coordinate would center Dean in a square frame in my FFplayer command, and if I don't like how he's centered, I'll simply move the x-coordinate over a little (decrease to move left, increase to move right).

So in my Example...

In FFmpeg, for my first shot, I'm going to guess x=300.

cd ~/Desktop/FRAMES/1 ffplay -vf "crop=1080:1080:300:1080" -loop 0 Test.gif

The FFplayer window shows me this:

And I feel like the crop starts a little too far to the right. So I'm going to decrease my x-coordinate just a little—to 250. After replacing the 300 with a 250 and running again in FFplay, I feel good about 250, so that's the crop I'll set: -vf "crop=1080:1080:250:1080".

I need to follow this same process to determine the crop of my other shots (and keep a copy of the commands I used later!). What is useful however, is that 3 of my shots are all on Dean sitting (shots 1, 3, and 5). This means I can apply the same crop I made for shot 1 to shots 3 and 5.

See Step 5 in my script on Github to see all 5 shots.

___________________________________________

6. Test Coloring and Sharpening

___________________________________________

Because the lighting in this scene is pretty good, I did a very simple recoloring on this set. I may update later with a more extensive coloring tutorial with more options later (I'll link the post to this section if I do). Previously, we added a crop to our command: -vf "crop=1080:1080:250:1080" and now we want to test coloring options and a sharpening effect.

Coloring Template

I'm going to throw in the basics, and give you an updated FFplay template (new parts are bolded, variables you can adjust are in red and set at their default values).

cd ~/Desktop/FRAMES/ShotNumber ffplay -vf "crop=w:h:x:y,eq=brightness=0.00:saturation=1.00:contrast=1.00,smartblur=1.5:-0.35:-3.5:0.65:0.25:2.0" -loop 0 Test.gif

NOTE: Notice that inside the quotes, a comma separates the command options crop, eq, and smartblur. Equals signs and colons distinguish between sub-options belonging to each of those three categories.

EQ:

brightness=0.00. Values can be adjusted anywhere between -1 and 1, with 0 as the default). I would adjust this setting in 0.01 unit increments.

saturation=1.0. Values between 0 and 3 are possible. 1 is the default value. I would adjust this setting in 0.1 unit increments at a time.

contrast=1.00. Increases contrast between light and shadow in the image (values between -1000 and 1000 are possible. I recommend you change this setting in 0.1 unit increments.

There are more color and image adjustment options than these available in FFmpeg. You can see a full list of properties you can adjust from eq here.

Smartblur:

smartblur=1.5:-0.35:-3.5:0.65:0.25:2.0 sharpens the frames. I recommend you not touch this setting. If you do want to adjust it, check the FFmpeg documentation. You can also remove this whole portion (and the associated comma) if you don't want a sharpening adjustment.

NOTE: It is also possible to add a curves adjustment to brighten certain parts of an image instead of the whole image. I haven’t worked with curves enough from the command line to give you good ideas on setting your curve and this set didn’t really need it, but if I get into it more in the future, I'll include it in a supplementary tutorial and link it here.

If you feel like you are losing all sense of objectivity and just want to see the images without your coloring at any point, simply re-run your ffplay from the end of the cropping section.

ffplay -vf  "crop=w:h:x:y" Test.gif

In my example (shot 1):

Because all my characters are in the same room with similar lighting, I ended up applying the same color adjustment to all of my shots. But here's all my settings tested together on my first shot in FFplay:

cd ~/Desktop/FRAMES/1 ffplay -vf "crop=1080:1080:250:1080,eq=brightness=0.06:saturation=1.70:contrast=1.10,smartblur=1.5:-0.35:-3.5:0.65:0.25:2.0" -loop 0 Test.gif

See Step 6 in my script on Github to see all 5 shots.

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7. Apply crop and coloring to frames

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Up until this point, you have not actually applied your crop and color adjustments to your frames. You have simply tested your crop and coloring manipulations on a gif of all your frames that is still, if you go look at it in your file browser, not cropped.

So let's actually apply our adjustments to these frames!

NOTE: Captioning needs to be done after this step because auto centering the text won't work properly without actually cropping first). This is probably all for the better as our command is getting long and difficult to decipher!

Template to ACTUALLY Crop and Color

cd ~/Desktop/FRAMES/ShotNumber mkdir crop for i in *.png; do ffmpeg -y -i "$i" -vf "fps=30,crop=w:h:x:y,eq=brightness=0.00:saturation=1.00:contrast=1.00,smartblur=1.5:-0.35:-3.5:0.65:0.25:2.0" crop/${i%.png}.png; done

The first line (beginning with cd) tells us to go to our shot folder.

mkdir crop tells our computer to make a new subfolder in our shot folder called "crop".

for i in *.png; do ffmpeg -y -i "$i"; and the closing: crop/${i%.png}.png; done tells FFmpeg to do the same crop and color on every .png file in our shot folder, and save these adjusted shots into the crop subfolder.

In my example (shot 1)

cd ~/Desktop/FRAMES/1 mkdir crop for i in *.png; do ffmpeg -y -i "$i" -vf "crop=1080:1080:250:1080,eq=brightness=0.06:saturation=1.7:contrast=1.1,smartblur=1.5:-0.35:-3.5:0.65:0.25:2.0" crop/${i%.png}.png; done

See Step 7 in my script on Github to see all 5 shots.

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8. Captioning

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Now we need to apply captions. You can also do an FFplay command here, but I'm going to show you something a little different with FFplay this time to see your caption. Instead of looking at captions over a whole gif, let's just test how our captions look on the first frame in our shot, since that's really all we need for captioning.

Captioning FFplay Template

Not all sets (and not all shots!) need captions (and if your set doesn't, you can skip down to the next section!) However, two of my shots need captions: Shot 1 and Shot 3. If you want to add captions, you can test them in FFplay on a single shot using this command:

cd ~/Desktop/FRAMES/ShotNumber/crop ffplay -vf "drawtext=text='Your Text Goes Here':x=(w-text_w)/2:y=(h-text_h*2):fontsize=40:bordercolor=black:borderw=3:fontcolor=white" input.png

The default font is Arial. There are ways to set other fonts, but I haven't looked into them much because I'm pretty happy with Arial. This basic template with the existing numbers should give you a decent result, but if you want to change font sizing or colors or anything:

drawtext=text='Your Text Goes Here' | This is the most important bit. You place your caption in the red part. Note that your text will appear on just one line. If you have a longer statement from a character that will need two lines, you can draw your box twice. (I will add a link here for this alternative when I eventually try it).

x=(w-text_w)/2:y=(h-text_h*2) | This part centers the text on the bottom of the screen. I recommend you leave it alone as it’s intended to auto-center your text for you no matter what your crop ratio is. You will need to change the the y=(h-text_h*2) argument only if you have two lines of text to caption your frames with.

fontsize=40 | Changes the font size, of course.

bordercolor=black | changes the border color.

borderw=3 | changes the border weight.

fontcolor=white | This changes the font color.

input.png is the file name of the frame you want to view your caption on.

By the way, when changing text or border colors, you can type in colors coded into the documentation (the default is black) or insert a HEX color code in this field. For example, I always use yellow captions for Dean, so I found a yellow HEX code (#FDDA0D) I liked on htmlcolorcodes.com.

Here's how I FFplay my caption "You missed a spot."

cd ~/Desktop/FRAMES/1/crop ffplay -vf "drawtext=text='You missed a spot.':x=(w-text_w)/2:y=(h-text_h*2):fontsize=40:bordercolor=black:borderw=3:fontcolor=#FDDA0D" frame_0018.png

See Step 8 in my script on Github to see both captioned shots.

Template for applying your caption:

If you like the way your caption looks in FFplay, you can apply it to all the frames in your shot folder with:

cd ~/Desktop/FRAMES/ShotNumber/crop mkdir captioned for i in .png; do ffmpeg -y -i "$i" -vf "drawtext=text='Your Text Goes Here.':x=(w-text_w)/2:y=(h-text_h2):fontsize=40:bordercolor=black:borderw=3:fontcolor=white" captioned/${i%.png}.png; done

Where

mkdir captioned makes a folder in the crop folder called "captioned"

for i in *.png; do ffmpeg -y -i "$i"; and the closing: crop/${i%.png}.png; done tells FFmpeg to place the same caption over every .png file in our shot folder, and save these adjusted shots into the captioned subfolder.

Here's the settings to apply captions to my first shot.

cd ~/Desktop/FRAMES/1/crop mkdir captioned for i in .png; do ffmpeg -y -i "$i" -vf "drawtext=text='You missed a spot.':x=(w-text_w)/2:y=(h-text_h2):fontsize=40:bordercolor=black:borderw=3:fontcolor=#FDDA0D" captioned/${i%.png}.png; done

See Step 8 in my script on Github to see both captioned shots.

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9. Organize shots into GIF folders

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We're almost done!!! It's time to go back to our file browser! Now that all of our frames in all of our shots are prepared how we want, we need to reorganize our shots into GIF folders. This is our way of group selecting all the frames that go into one gif for export.

In my case, I want three gifs, so I'm going to make three new folders in the FRAMES folder: gif_1, gif_2, and gif_3. My FRAMES folder should now look like this:

Now I want to take my finished shots from my shot folders and copy their frames into the gif folder they are associated with. For example:

Gif 1 just contains the first shot. I also captioned shot 1. So I'm going to copy all the frames in FRAMES/1/crop/captioned into the gif_1 folder.

Gif 2 contains shots 2 and 3. Shot 2 has captions, so I need to take all the frames from FRAMES/2/crop/captioned and all the frames in FRAMES/3/crop and copy them in the gif_2 folder.

Gif 3 contains shots 4 and 5. I'm going to copy the contents of the crop folders for shots 4 and 5 into this folder (no captions on this gif).

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10. Compiling into GIF

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To combine all the frames from one gif folder into a gif, I'm going to use this template script:

cd ~/Desktop/FRAMES/GifFolder ffmpeg -y -start_number FileNumberOnFirstFrame -i frame_%04d.png -vf "fps=30,scale=540:-1:flags=lanczos" ~/Desktop/FRAMES/GifName.gif

This is very similar to the script in step 4. This template opens one of our new gif folders, and takes all the frames, starting with the first frame in the folder (recall: you need to tell FFmpeg the 4-digit number on that first frame with FileNumberOnFirstFrame) and then turns it into a gif running at 30 FPS, scaled down to 540 by 540 pixels.

The parts we can/should adjust are as follows:

GifFolder is the name of our gif folder where our frames for our gif are located.

scale=540:-1:flags=lanczos is the command to scale down our gif (using what's called the lanczos method) to 540 x 540 pixels so it'll be small enough to upload to Tumblr.

fps=30 tells FFmpeg the proper FPS for our set (if you made your frames using this tutorial, 30 FPS is correct. If you took screencaps manually, it will be the frame rate of whatever you giffed. For TV, this might be 23 FPS for example).

~/Desktop/FRAMES/GifName.gif names our gif (specify with GifName) and outputs it to the FRAMES main folder.

Here's the command for Gif 1 in my set:

cd ~/Desktop/FRAMES/gif_1 ffmpeg -y -start_number 0018 -i frame_%04d.png -vf "fps=30,scale=540:-1:flags=lanczos" ~/Desktop/FRAMES/1.gif

See Step 10 in my script on Github to the script on all three gifs.

THE END!!!!

Do this step on all your gif folders and you're done!!!

You can view my full script for this example gifset on Github here and if you'd like, simply modify that script to make your own gifset!

[rampldgifs]

hi! first of all, i want to say that i love your gifs so much, you always make such beautiful things. i recently started giffing, and i was wondering if you have any tips about settings or process you usually use in your coloring psds? i'm struggling on what steps i should follow :(

hello ! thank you for taking the time to say this !

i usually never know what to say off the top of my head because i am generally chaotic & do things by whim and instinct rather than any real process, but !!! luckily, i was just talking to a friend about it recently so here's what i got.

photoshop settings- i've mentioned this in my main blog before, if you're not already doing this, load all your giffing steps into an action. if you don’t know how to make an action this handy tutorial tells you how. - change your most used commands into easily reachable keyboard shortcuts on the keyboard. for example, assuming you're right handed, your right hand will be cropping and colouring so you could switch command + (w) to open file>export>save for web to see your saving settings / command + ( ` ) to select the next tab. (i'm on a mac so imagine i used windows alternatives ) by using your left hand.

gif saving settings you might have your favourite go-to settings i.e. selective/pattern & bicubic etc. but just like not all sharpenings are created equal, different gif save settings work better for different sharpening styles. try different combis, the results may surprise you. for example, i used to swear by selective pattern+bicubic sharper when saving gifs, but i switched my sharpening style, and started going for a smoother, cleaner, glowier look, and realised after a lot of trial and error that adaptive/diffusion + bicubic smoother works best for the high value sharpening+gaussian blur settings i'm using to create what i want. the big lesson here is don't be afraid to strip everything down and go back to basics sometimes, it's tedious, but it usually pays off. i tried to find the post that taught me this for you and i can't but this one is an alternative !

colouring - the main things you'll be doing to colour a gif are (i don't always follow these in order but usually i do): a) brighten ( i.e. curves, levels, brightness, i used to add a white balance filter but stopped doing that years ago ) b) deepen ( these would be your contrast/gamma correction & offset on exposure adjustment layer/left arrow thingy of the levels adjustment layer ) c) colour correct, the hardest part ! it's like doing makeup. you'll end up using probably everything, colour balance, curves in the rgb setting (i need to learn to get comfy with this bc i'm not yet, but! soon.), selective colour my bff, hue/saturation & vibrance. there are great tutorials out there, but my most recent game-changer is i've finally figured out how to use the channel mixer adjustment. it helps to focus on a neutral colour in the background of your gif when it has an awful orange/green/whatever filter when using channel mixer (like a white wall or blue sky that has turned gross looking bc of the film's base filter), then adjust and play around until it turns into the colour it's supposed to be. then it will be easier to pile on layers over to colour your fc. i am ofc still learning, i have no idea how colour lookup works (i've read tutorials and still don't understand jvhakjx). d) final adjustments. this is when after the above, you decide whether you want to stylise your colouring, make it more vibrant, less vibrant, give it a tint, brighten again or enhance certain colours before saving! - a great way i got the hang of colourings is to open up colouring psds other people have made and toggle each adjustment layer on and off to see what difference they make to the base, you'll start to understand what the purpose of each thing is and why the layers are in that specific order.

last but not least, it took me 10 years to make gifs the way i do now ! my early gifs were all experimental, i went through so many phases (some i'm quite ashamed of, like the low vibrance/high saturation + high brightness trick i used to abuse. why did i do that.), and i did in fact master each adjustment layer (by this i mean learn to use them to their best potential) one by one. don't get discouraged, be patient with yourself and don't be afraid to try things !