#YES I'M AWARE THEY WERE MADE BACK WHEN OUR POST SIZES COULD ONLY BE 500PX WIDE BUT I'M STILL ANNOYED

[vetinarihavelock]

For the sake of having more than just an ego trip, I will say: I was looking at my oldest, eight-year-old sets for the first time in a while while I was composing my previous tag-vomit, and oh boy the rookie mistakes that took place! Granted I can't be that tough on myself - not because I wanna be nice to newbie!me, but because it was 2015, and while we had at least advanced to the point of not having our size limits be locked within the couple-hundred kilobytes range (jfc 2012 and earlier gif editors were braver than US marines), two megabytes was still really fucking rough, so I can't judge us for straying too far from our modern standards like "no chopping every other frame" or "seriously no frame delays slower than .05 seconds or we'll choke you." (Yeah this was back when .06 pretty much had to be a much more tolerated option, particularly if you were an editor who prioritized vibrant lighting/coloring over having longer running gifs. Frame cuts were still a necessary evil a lot of the time.) But yeah, I might rag against bad coloring, but if you're trying to figure that shit out on your own and you're not even seeing the best editing this site has to offer, let alone studying them considerably, it can be rough figuring out what the fuck you gotta do. Hell, based on my own tag search, I didn't even know what the fucking point was for sharpening for most of the first month. You know - that thing that makes you look more HD than the original footage? Oof.

That all being said, though: Going further into my original editing tags, turns out I improved a lot faster than I remembered. Like, I'd barely been at it for a month, and yet by that span of time, my coloring stopped looking like it was painted on by a four-year-old and I actually learned what the preferred sharpening settings were. I am once again boggled by how quickly I got from "forgivable newbie bad" to "actually... kinda passable." And it was all just up from there.

...Holy shit, I completely forgot that I had actually made before-and-after gifs on that first year. Well okay not really; that's just how they coincidentally worked out for me: It didn't take long for me to want a cool sidebar gif of my own making once I got started, but I ended up improving so dramatically by the end of the year that I couldn't stand looking at my original bad shit anymore, so I had to replace it with something that was more on my more end-of-year level. And thanks to their sidebar status making them literally some of the only gifs that didn't have my original signature, for once in my life I can stop sounding like a weird braggart and safely show a small glimpse of my babby abilities!

Feb 2015 vs Dec 2015

So... Yeah, when you see me rave on somebody for their fantastic coloring/editing skills, I'd like to think I know what I'm talking about. :)