#https://kinghotboy.tumblr.com/private/649491290766049280/tumblr_qs5fh6Gf9v1z1zg1m

[kinghotboy]

melia teach me how to gif you’re the only exclusively atl blog i know that makes their own gifs 😔 which is amazing considering a lot of their videos online are kinda low quality

hello i need u to know that this msg made me smile biiiig time but also ended me becos it made me realise that my Giffing Process is a fucking mess and extremely inconsistent. so tHANKYOU for this. a real wake up call. but u are so right! all time low give us SCRAPS to work with and we just? let them?? like we literally just let them and they fucking get away with that. insane.

here is tutorial attempt #3 and i rly hope it makes sense and helps in any way possible <3

let us go from this to THAT.

okay i am assuming you know the standard gif making process and know how to import and crop and set time delay etc so im gonna jump straight to the colouring!

firstly, lets start with some brightness/contrast! with low quality videos, half the goal is usually trying to hide the fact that the content your giffing looks like it was filmed on a flip phone in 2001 :/ but the good thing about concert videos is that they usually have mainly black backgrounds!! which is so so so handy. thank you concert videos. so basically, let’s very gently try to like. lean into the dark parts. gently.

brightness: +2 contrast: +10

next! we can head over to curves! curves on low quality gifs are my best fucking friend. curves on HQ gifs on the other hand? not so much. imo, curves has a tendency to pixelate/add noise, the heavier you use it, but if you gif is already LQ? it kinda seems to enhance it? literally begging my brain to make that make sense i’m so sorry but basically, curves on LQ gifs = good!

RBG

input: 20 output: 0

okay so now that we’ve brightened up alex and his Stage a bit, we can focus more on colours! so let’s go to colour balance. colour balance is a very very very good friend and we love her a lot. they’re also nice enough to try help you balance out the colours in sections of shadows, midtones, and highlights which is literally SO nice of them. i’ve read some tutorials these past few months where people say that you might use midtones and barely touch the other options and thats crazy, colour balance does so much for us! shadows helps us hide the Pixelated Look, so we have fun playing around with those dials, midtones kinda helps the overall look of the gif? maybe? and highlights is where we can make some colours Pop. literally let’s just slide dials until we’re happy with what we’ve created.

SHADOWS:

cyan/red: +2 magenta/green: -3 yellow/blue: +3

MIDTONES:

cyan/red: +2 magenta/green: +2 yellow/blue: +3

HIGHLIGHTS:

cyan/red: -2 magenta/green: -5 yellow/blue: +2

oh, now we’re up to selective colour! colour balances sister! we love her too omg. this is where we can rly like, lean into the colours we want and maybe try cut out the colours we don’t. this ones FUN.

personally, i always start of with black becos we can really get the background looking Dark here. then we can focus on vibing with the colours.

BLACK:

cyan: 0 magenta: 0 yellow: 0 black: +12

RED:

cyan: -8 magenta: +16 yellow: -2 black: +15

YELLOW: /

GREEN: /

CYAN:

cyan: +15 magenta: -5 yellow: -5 black: +6

BLUE:

cyan: +5 magenta: +5 yellow: +3 black: +12

MAGENTA:

cyan: -5 magenta: +3 yellow: -2 black: +6

NEUTRAL: /

WHITE: /

now! exposure! good time to see if your gif still needs a bit of brightening or still needs to look? deeper? the colours a bit richer? idk how to describe it but like you’ll know it when you see it. anyway this is That Place. please note i’ve never used the offset slide in my life but exposure and gamma correction are extremely handy.

exposure: +0.08 offset: / gamma correction: 0.97

that is ALL i have done to colour this gif. i 100% definitely use more curves, especially the red/green/blue options a lot, it’s incredible with helping colour correct! also levels and hue/saturation!! if i’m still struggling with the colour! but i feel like i don’t always use them, whereas everything listed above are steps i use with absolutely every gif!! so. was gonna link you a colour tutorial thing that helped me greatly and literally made me say holy shit that makes so much sense out loud but op deactived :( im so sorry, you’re stuck with my mess instead.

okay last thing that helps make lq gifs not completely abysmal to look at, is filtering! we all know the usual suspects aka sharpening and adding the gaussian blur, but with already grainy gifs? that sometimes enhances the grainy-ness? and it then just looks. not incredible. not fun. but! if we lean IN to the grainy-ness and the pixelated look and add a noise filter? what a treat!!!

so go through the usual steps of converting to timeline and converting to smart filters, duplicating your layer etc 

add some smart sharpen!

amount: 500 radius: 0.3 remove: gaussian blur

add some gaussian blur!

radius: 1.0

now, add noise! (filter → noise → add noise)

amount: 5 (depending on the quality of the gif and the overall look you want! i usually range between 3 - 6) distribution: uniform

now! we change the opacity for the blur and the noise layers! click the little slide looking icon on the right of the respective layers and for the blur layer i have it set at 20% opacity but you can usually have it anywhere ranging from 15% - 30%. and for the noise layer i have it at 40% but that can be anywhere usually ranging from 20% - 80%!!!

so basically, we started Here

and now we get this!