#sorry it's a lil blurry I'm bad at taking pics lol

[demented-zombie]

I was in the waiting room of a clinic and saw this cute chubby boy wearing a Sonic The Hedgehog cap and it was the most adorable thing ever. I didn't take a picture but I drew it on a sticky note to share.

[everglowz]

Hiii I just saw your recent gifset and I was wondering if you could share some colouring/quality tips for gifs?? I've been having some issues lately and I'm trying to collect knowledge from people with great skills, thanks in advance!

hiii!! <3 first of all, thanks omg :(( i feel absolutely underqualified to be giving advice but i'll try to tell u some stuff that i think makes gifs look nicer (i'll do it after a read more so that i don't clog up the dash)

idk how much experience you have in making gifs so i'm gonna be all over the place probably lmao sorry!!

first all, in connection to quality, using anything other than photoshop to gif (like websites or stuff like that) is gonna make your gifs look much less hq no matter how nice the actual footage is. sadly no website can beat ps :( also, using 4k/1080p clips is going to make your job much easier. I use 4kdownloader to get videos from youtube and it works great most of the times.

in terms of processing, once i get my video i use vapoursynth but i don't sharpen/denoise there. i think the vs sharpening is a bit too harsh sometimes and the denoising can be too extreme. (i know ppl get great results w sharpening/denoising there tho!! i've never got it to work like that lol) after the clip is opened in ps, i sharpen there. my settings are very basic (amount 500% and radius 0.4px and then i do that again but with amount 10% and radius 10px) if the original clip is too lq and i'm not satisfied with how the gif looks i might use topaz clean / denoise a little bit. but i try to keep that light. in my personal opinion, i think gifs that are too smooth (so much so that their hair gets blurry and stuff) just don't look as nice. i'd rather have a slightly grainy gif over a very very smooth gif where ppl don't look like ppl.

a lil trick i do when i'm not as pleased with the quality and the gifs are from mvs is to add a little bit of grain using the smart filter. so then the grain looks like it's there on purpose and not bc the og clip is bad (other times i just add noise for aesthetics like with my keppie gifset)

another tool some ccs use is high pass. i feel like high pass needs to be used lightly because sometimes it just makes people look like dolls :(( it's like it takes away all texture and it just looks... slightly odd? i tried to use it a few times but in the end i went back to my own sharpening. i just think it's a tool that needs to be used v carefully.

ok, coloring time!! coloring can literally fix a gif sometimes hahah. like a gif that looks kinda grainy suddenly u color it and it becomes ten times better. when i color, i start by messing with the curves and i tend to do this (this pic is just me messing with a random gif hahah)

i obviously play around with that but i love doing this because it makes my blacks darker. i also play around with exposure and i tend to bring the exposure up a little, bring the offset down a little and the gamma correction up (again, me messing around randomly just so u can see how my settings might end up looking visually. the numbers change all the time because it's not that i do it exactly like this all the time)

i've been told (and i can attest to it myself) that having gifs with a lot of contrast is good for quality so i feel like doing these prev things (and also messing with the blacks in selective color) allows me to bring out that contrast and also make gifs that i enjoy (i'm a high contrast gif lover) but you also have to be mindful not to make your subjects too white by upping the exposure or messing with curves too much. whitewashing is a no no, even if whitewashed gifs always end up looking less grainy >:( for skintone i play around with color balance and selective color mostly. if the whitewashing in the original video is too much, i might go to color lookup, use the preset 3strip, set the layer as 'darken' and mess with the opacity and then if it ends up looking too red i might do the same with a 'fall color' layer and lower the opacity even more for that one (or else the gifs looks too yellow). i also play around with the reds and the yellows in hue/saturation

finally, when i export the gifs, i make sure that i pick the saving mode (i'm sure this is not the proper way to call this but anyways sdfasd) that makes the gif looks better. like sometimes i find that with green gifs some settings make the gif look atrocious so i have to use adaptable for those but anyways i usually mess around w that hahah

idk if this was useful in any sort of way??? if u have a question about something that i mentioned here or i want to ask me more u can totally dm me or come back and ask me 'hey girl wtf?' because i'm so so bad at explaining things by text!! also i wrote this under the idea that u are sort of knowledgable on how to gif but idk !!