#so might as well write smn i can link back to if i ever do lol

[bargalaxies]

can i ask you how the DUCK you get your arcane gifs so silky smooth? even the ones that have tons of super bright colors just look flawless and it seems like wizardry to me

lolll thanks, glad you like them 😄 Generally speaking, I have a tutorial tag where I've answered questions about my coloring and sharpening process. It’s the same way I make Arcane sets.

More specific to your question, you definitely want to make sure you gif from as HQ a source as possible always, and don’t oversharpen your gifs. (I’ve talked more extensively about that here.) That’ll immediately make your job a lot easier. I think coloring vibrant gifs is the harder part, so I’ll explain my thought process for that some more.

Gifs can only have 256 colors, so I’d think about the following:

You should try to make as much “negative space” as possible instead of involving the “actual” colors. You can usually do this with the background, because that’s typically not what the main focus of the gif is. If you do this, it frees up more space in the color table for the colors you actually want in your gif. This is probably the most important thing you could do.

The more you limit your palette (i.e. making a gif blue-themed, or red-themed, etc.), the more shades of that color can be included in the color table, so the nicer it’ll look. I’d say if you want to include a lot of shades in a gif, you should limit yourself to two.

The more colors you want to include in your gif, the less shades of those colors there should be, so that each color can be represented with the minimum possible in your color table.

Also, in general, smaller gifs mean typically mean less pixels/colors, so those will look nicer if you want to include a lot of colors in your gif. That being said, I like big gifs a lot, so mostly I try to make those work :P

I’ve included some example gifs and commentary on how/why I colored them the way they did under the cut for further context. Hopefully, I’ve been detailed enough, but if you have any more questions, my inbox/DMs are always open :)

Example 1

Caitlyn is what people are going to be looking at in this gif, so we want to make sure there are enough colors for her in the table to make her look good. In the original screencaps, the background would take more more colors than we want it to because of the trees and fog, as would her gun:

So, when coloring this scene, I tried to darken the shadows of her gun and brighten the highlights in the background as much as possible without making the gif have too much contrast (which can also ruin a gif, imo; you kind of just need to eyeball that part). I did this with Curves, Selective Color, and Levels.

In the end, I’d say at least a third of the gif is just white and black. Therefore, that leaves more colors for Caitlyn herself, which make the gif look nicer to the viewer.

Example 2

I can’t do the same thing to the background that I did for the previous example, because I want it to be seen as part of the gif with Vi and Jinx. So instead, I decided to darken the shadows on the bottom half of Vi and Jinx themselves as much as possible. This is because when people look at this gif, they will primarily notice Vi hugging Jinx, which is mostly just the middle of the gif. They probably won’t be paying close attention to the bottom half of Vi and Jinx that much.

Since this was a bit difficult to do just using adjustment layers, I literally added a blank layer of black paint on the bottom and put a multiply filter over it. Look at the gif again — the edges of the “shadow” there don’t actually move. You can see the edges pretty easily across Jinx’s gun. That’s that layer!

But I’d hope that most people either wouldn’t notice it until it got pointed out, or noticed it but think it looked “real” enough that the gif still looks good in general. I’ve used this idea for some of my other gifs too.

Example 3

This is an example of the “limited color palette” I mentioned earlier. The less colors you include in a gif, the more space you can just devote to shades of that color in the table, so the result will look nicer. This can be hard to do and make it look consistent, though. For the above gif, I actually layer masked the entire background to have that magenta hue because I couldn’t figure out another way to do it lol. Tbh it took a lot of time and effort and I’m not sure I’d do it again. But I do think the end product looks really nice, so if you want to put in the time to do something like that, go for it!

That being said, I also think these types of gifs (themed colors) are not really used for gifsets of shot-for-shot scenes (i.e. the first example gif), but more for “artistic” kinds of sets. Since you’re not trying to follow a scene shot-for-shot, you can make it easier on yourself by picking scenes that will be easy to gif in this manner. Here’s an example of a gif from such a set.

All I did here was shift the hue/saturation meter on the original blue sky background to yellow. I was able to do this because blue was not a color actually seen on Mel here at all, so changing the cyans/blues in the screencaps didn’t affect her look. Since the yellow background shades are fairly uniform, yellow is the color of her jewelry, and we get a lot of solid black in her hair and outfit, you see that Mel looks very HQ.

Example 4

This is a more “multi-colored” gif. We can see red, yellow, green, blue, and purple. However, each of these colors have large areas that have similar shades. When coloring the screencap, I tried to make these areas as uniform as possible. So, not as many colors in the table need to be occupied for each hue to represent all of them in the gif. That’s how the gif looks colorful, but still smooth.

Example 5

It kind of looks like there’s a lot going on in this gif, but again, it’s mostly a few colors. A lot of this gif is the blacks and whites, important as discussed earlier. The main colors are still magenta and blue, with some uniform yellow/orange highlights. You can see this reflected in this gif’s color table, which is largely shades of magenta, and then blue:

So, it still looks fine when saved.