#bc don't let this fool you 99.8% of the time i have no idea what the hell i'm doing

[goblinfvckr]

gif + colouring tutorial! ✨

i’ve been asked about my gif-making process a couple of times, so as promised, i put a little tutorial together! i’ve never done a tutorial before, so this was an adventure! 😅

when it comes to colouring, i find that a lot of it is personal preference. i prefer vibrant and saturated (perhaps sometimes oversaturated) colours and smokey greyscales, hence why i chose our illustrious cardinal in chapter six for this. i love the story videos, but i hate how desaturated they are. so let’s fix that!

this is for PHOTOSHOP CC 2017, but i think other photoshop versions are fairly similar. we’ll start with the video already imported into layers on our canvas and appropriately cropped and trimmed, so i’m not going to take this right from the top.

okie dokie, here’s our before/after!

so all colouring is, essentially, is messing around with a whole bunch of adjustment layers. it’s honestly just.... trial and error and fiddling around with settings and opacities and different combinations of things until you find what you like. there’s no right or wrong way to colour something; there’s only experimenting and finding what works best for you. it takes practice.

when i’m colouring something, i usually like to start with a curves layer first to brighten things up. we do that by going layer ➜ new adjustment layer ➜ curves. all of the other adjustments we’ll be using are found in the exact same menu! adjustment layers are friends! these are my settings for the curves:

and you can see it’s already made a big difference:

after that i’ll typically put on a vibrance layer. i love the vibrance adjustment ‘cause it just makes things pop. it’s a really quick and easy way to adjust the saturation and the brightness of your gif.

i’ll also do a brightness/contrast layer, which is another big favourite, and does exactly what it sounds like. i’ll normally up both of these until i achieve my desired effect. lowering the contrast can be very helpful too! i particularly like lowering it if i’m editing for a b/w gif, as it can help create more of a gentle greyscale.

here we are after our curves, vibrance, and brightness/contrast adjustments:

getting there!!! but i’m still not satisfied, so i’m going to go for the levels.  this layer can be very useful for enriching shadows. on it you’ll see three toggles (black, grey, white) which translate to shadows, midtones, and highlights. i rarely touch the highlights. shadows and midtones only, babey. but again, play around and see what works for you and for that particular gif. i’ll start by adjusting the shadows, then move to midtones, which i generally don’t take too far away from its 1.00 starting point. a little can go a long way.

after that i’ll typically pop on a selective colour layer to tweak the colours a little bit. there’s several adjustable colour menus, but i mostly use the blacks, reds, yellows, and neutrals. this layer can be particularly good for darkening your blacks. this is one where you really gotta dig in and play around. i’m not going to screenshot my settings for every adjustment, but this is what my reds looks like:

finally, if i’m still not satisfied with the colours, i’ll usually add on a hue/saturation layer. there is an additional “lightness” setting on it, but i generally don’t touch it. actually, i don’t tend to fuck around too much with the hue settings either. i use this layer to give a final boost to the colours.

annnnnnd that’s it for colouring! once i’m happy with where i’m at, i normally group all of my adjustment layers into a folder, just to keep things nice and clean. now we’ve just got to sharpen and then save our gif! sharpening is one of the most important steps -- i find the difference in quality between an unsharpened and sharpened gif to be immediately noticeable. 

to do this, i’m going to start by ensuring that i have both the first frame and the first layer selected in their respective panes. this is important! then from the animation pane i’m going to go to select all frames. once all animation frames are selected, i’m going to select convert to timeline, again from the animation pane. right off the bat you’ll notice that every layer has been made “visible” and your timeline should now look something like:

from here, we’re going to select all layers, which i do quickly by just using the shift key. once all our layers are selected, we’re going to right click and select convert to smart object. this will condense everything into a single layer.

now it’s sharpenin’ time! i use the smart sharpen function for all my gifs, so filter ➜ sharpen ➜ smart sharpen. these are my settings:

that’s it! we’re ready to export. so file ➜ export ➜ save for web. what settings you have here can also affect the output of your gif. be patient here! since my laptop is a piece of shit, photoshop can take a good few moments to load the preview, just leave it alone to do its thing. hopefully you have a better computer and don’t have to wait! here are my current gif settings:

almost theeere... don’t forget to change the looping options to forever, of course! then smash that mf save button!!!!!

annnnnnnd tada! we’re done! (ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

you can do lots of cool things with layer adjustments, so branch out and experiment with them all, including the ones i didn’t use here. feel free to use as many or as few adjustment layers as you want, and don’t hesitate to use the same type of adjustment more than once if you need to re-correct anything. practice, experiment, and have fun!! alrighto....

thank you very much for sticking with me!! i hope everything was clear, but please ask if you’d like me to clarify anything. 💖