#tagged: ps help

[chikoriita]

what is good sharpening vs oversharpening? im sorry if i have oversharpened anything i am to new to this

It's a great question! There are a lot of reasons that oversharpening is a problem and just one is that it causes intense colorwashing. Oversharpening introduces excess graininess that skews skin tones and accentuates stray highlights that can wash out a gif.

I want to preface this post with this: I am not here to shame anyone who is oversharpening.

The most important part of this answer is to bring awareness of why these basic steps of gifmaking are so important to the whole process.

Each of these gif pairs are uncolored, unedited, and has the same save settings. The only difference is the sharpening settings that are listed on each gif. The left side has my usual sharpening filters, and the right side has the filters that usually lead to oversharpening.

(Kate Sharma, Bridgerton, 2022, 1080p footage live action)

(Matilda, 1996, 1080p footage live action)

(Barbara Howard, Abbott Elementary, 2022, 1080p footage live action)

(Miles Morales, Into the Spider-verse, 2018, 1080p footage animated)

It's not a crime to oversharpen your gifs, but it does lead to the slippery slope of colorwashing (even for white people).

Look for the halo: If you look at the oversharpened gif of Barbara, you can see a yellow outline around her hair. That is an obvious indicator of going too far.

Use a layer mask to see what the colors were before sharpening: you can see in most of the oversharpened gifs above that there is a huge difference in the colors shown vs. in the less sharpened gif.

If you're working with older footage: don't try to overcorrect the graininess of the media. It's okay if some of it comes through!

Try to get the highest quality footage you can: I primarily work in 1080p files because my poor laptop starts to sound like a plane taking off when I try to screencap 4K files. If you're like me, look for larger file sizes. That will reduce the graininess of the gif.

Here are some links to different sharpening actions and guides: daenerys-stormborn action anyataylorjoy action anya-chalotra sharpening guide

These are great to use if you are starting out in Photoshop! (psst if you need a hookup lmk) I know some people don't use PS, and for them, I put my sharpening settings on this post. I think both of the action sets I linked above have similar if not the same settings.

Also, one thing I noticed when making the gif pairs is that the less sharpened gif was always a smaller size. Fixing sharpening settings might help people who are trying their best to keep things under the 10mb limit.

I hope this answered your question, anon. If anyone has any questions or would like other resources, let me know!

[userpeggycarter]

COLORING + SHARPENING TUTORIAL

someone asked for a coloring tutorial and my sharpening settings, so here it is! there are also a few tips to achieve more HQ gifs. :)

tutorial under the cut!

FOR HIGH-QUALITY GIFS

FILE SIZES

it doesn’t matter what your sharpening settings are if the file you’re using to gif is too low quality, so i tend to look for the best that i can get when downloading stuff. 

usually, movies (+2h) look better if they’re 5GB or more, while an episode (40 min/1h) can look good with even 1GB. the minimum definition i try to find is 1080p, but i gif with 2160p (4k) when available. unfortunately, not every computer can handle 4k, but don’t worry, you can gif with 1080p files just fine if they are big enough. contrary to popular belief, size does matter! which means sometimes a bigger 1080p file is better than a smaller 2160p one, for example.

SCREENCAPPING METHOD

this can too influence the quality of your gifs. as a gifmaker, i’ve tried it all: video frames to layers, directly opening video clips, loading files into stack, and i’ve finally settled down with opening screencaps as an image sequence. with bigger files, it doesn’t matter much what technique you use, but i’ve noticed with smaller files you can do wonders if you screencap (either by loading files into stack or opening as an image sequence) instead of using video clips. for example, this gif’s original video file was only 4GB (so smaller than i’ve usually go for), if you can believe it!

here’s a tutorial for setting up and screencapping with MPV, the media player i use to screencap. again, you can keep using video clips for bigger files, but you’ll find this useful when dealing with dire causes. i don't file loads into stack, though, like the video does. i open as an image sequence (open > screencap folder > select any image > click the image sequence button). just select OK for the speed. this will open your screencaps as a video clip (blue bar) in timeline mode (i'm a timeline gifmaker, i don't know about you). you will need this action pack to convert the clip into frames if you're a frames gifmaker. i suggest you convert them into frames even if you're a timeline gifmaker, just convert them into a timeline again at the end. that way you can delete the screencaps right away, otherwise you will delete the screencaps and get a static image as a "gif".

ATTENTION if you’re a Mac Sonoma user, MPV won’t be an option for you unless you downgrade your system. that is, if you have an Intel chip. if you have M1 Max chip (or even a better one), here’s a fix for MPV you can try while keeping that MacOS, because nowadays MPV is skipping frames in its latest build. or you can use MPlayer instead for less hassle. here are two tutorials for setting and using MPlayer. Windows users are fine, you can use MPV without trouble.

FOR EVEN MORE QUALITY

ADD NOISE

here’s a tutorial for adding noise as a way to achieve more HQ gifs if your original material is too low quality.

REDUCE NOISE WITH CAMERA RAW

instead of adding noise, you can reduce it, especially if your gif is very noisy as it is. 

the path is filter > camera raw > detail > nose reduction. i do this before sharpening, but only my video file isn't great to begin with. because it’s a smart filter, you can reduce or increase its opacity by clicking the bars next to its name in the layers panel.

TOPAZ AI

i use Topaz Photo AI to increase the quality of my screencaps when i need to. it’s paid software, but there are… ways to find it for free, usually on t0rrent websites. if someone’s interested, i can make a tutorial solely about it in the future.

SHARPENING SETTINGS

here are my sharpening settings (filter > sharpen > smart sharpen). i sharpen things twice: 500% 0.4px + 10% 10px. here's an action for it, for more convenience. here's a tutorial on how to use Photoshop actions. for animated stuff, i use this action pack.

COLORING

here’s the gif i'm gonna use as a base. it’s already sharpened like the way i always do it.

LIGHTNING THE SHOTS

half of the secret of a good coloring is good lightning. i always useCurves (layers > new adjustment layer > curves) and Brightness & Contrast (layers > new adjustment layer > brightness & contrast). the settings depend on the scene you’re giffing, but i always try make my gifs bright and with high contrast to make the colors pop.

CURVES

besides lighting your scene, the Curves adjustment layer has four automatic options that will color-correct it for you. it’s not always perfect and it doesn’t mean you won’t need to do further coloring, but it’s a great start. it’s a lifesaver for most ridiculously yellow scenes. look at the difference! this gif uses the 3rd automatic option (the screenshot below isn't mine btw so that's why the fourth option is the chosen one), from top to bottom. what automatic option you need to choose depends on the gif.

sometimes i like to tweak my Curves layer. not everybody does that, it’s not that necessary and if you’re not careful, it can screw your gif up. to modify your layer by hand, you will need to click and drag points of that straight line in the position you desire. this is the concept behind it:

basically, the lower part of the line handles the shadows, while the upper part handles the highlights of the image. if you pull a highlight point up, the image’s highlights will be brighter. if you pull it down, it will make them darker. same thing for the shadow points. you should play with it to get a grasp of it, that’s what i did when i first started giffing.

BRIGHTNESS & CONTRAST

then i added a bit of brightness and contrast.

CHANNEL MIXER

the scene looked a bit too yellow, so i used the Channel Mixer (layer > new adjustment layer > channel mixer) adjustment layer. here’s a tutorial of how it works. not every scene needs the Channel Mixer layer though, i mostly use it to remove heavy overall tints. in this particular case, the Curves layer got rid of most of the yellow, but i wanted the gif to be just a bit more blue so the Channel Mixer tweaks are very minimal.

SELECTIVE COLOR

now, this adjustment layer i always use: Selective Color (layer > new adjustment layer > selective color). this is THE adjustment layer to me, alongside the Curves one. this is how it works:

ie, you can separately edit a color this way, giving it tints. for this gif, i wanted to make the colors more vibrant. to achieve that, i edited the selected colors this way:

for the reds, i added even more red in them by moving the first slider to the right, making the color more vibrant. for his hat to have a more warm tint, i added yellow to the reds (third slider, moving it to the right). finally, to make the reds stronger, i moved the last slider to the right (more black).

for the yellows, i made them brighter by adding white to them, thus making the tile wall and Paddington more bright as well.

for the cyans and the blues, i just added the maximum (+100) of black that i could.

i wanted for Paddington's nose to be brighter, so i added more white to the whites.

lastly, i added depth to the blacks by increasing their own blackness.

you should always play with the Selective Colors sliders for a bit, before deciding what you want or need. with time, you will automatically know what to change to correct the color grading. it all takes practice!

HUE/SATURATION

i don’t know if you noticed, but there are some green spots on the blue wall behind Paddington. to correct that, i added a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer (layer > new adjustment layer > hue/saturation) and made the saturation of the greens 0%, making that unwanted green disappear from the background.

while the green spots on the wall are specific for this gif, i use hue/saturation a lot to tweak, well, hue and saturation. sometimes someone’s skin is too yellow, i made it redder by tweaking the reds and the yellows, or vice-versa. the hue bar follows the rainbow bar, so the maximum settings (+100 and -100) give the selected color to change its hue to something more red or pink (the rainbow extremities). changing hue can give pretty whacky results, like turning someone’s skin tone to green, so you will need to play with it to get the hang of it. you can also tweak the opacity of your hue/saturation layer to further improve your gif’s coloring. i didn’t do it in this case, the opacity is still 100%. the reds and the blues had their saturation increased to make them pop just a bit more, without affecting the other colors.

COLOR BALANCE

the highlights of the gif still had a green tint to it due to the automatic correction of the Curves layer, so i used Color Balance. this is how it works: instead of giving specific colors some tints, you can give them to the shadows, highlights, and mid-tones. if your shadows are too blue, you counterbalance them with the opposite color, yellow. same thing with the cyan-red and magenta-green pairings. in my case, i added a bit of magenta.

B&W GRADIENT MAP

now, if this gif was a dish, it’s time for the salt and pepper. i always add a Gradient Map (layer > new adjustment layer > gradient map) (black to white gradient) with the Soft Light blending mode, thus giving my shadows more depth without messing with the mid-tones and highlights. it also doesn’t “deep fry” (you know those memes?) the gif too much by adding even more contrast. usually, the opacity of the layer is between 30% to 70%, it all depends on the gif. it always does wonders, though!

COLOR FILTER

finally, i like to add Color Filters (layer > new adjustment layer > color filter) to my gifs. it’s very handy when giving different scenes for the same minimalistic set because it makes them kind of match despite having completely different colors. in this gif’s case, i added a “deep blue” filter, opacity 50% density 25. you can change the density and the opacity of the layer for further editing, again, it all depends on the gif.

VIBRANCE

if i feel like it, i add a vibrance layer (layer > new adjustment layer > vibrance) to make the colors pop. this can ruin your coloring sometimes, especially when regarding skin color, so be careful. i didn't do it in this gif because i felt i didn't need it.

TA-DA! 🥳

AN OTHER EXAMPLE

the color grading of the original scene it’s pretty good as it is, to be honest. let’s see a worse scenario, a VERY yellow one:

no channel mixer this time because the automatic curves option dealt with the yellowness, but you can see it made the gif too green. i needed to correct that with the following adjustment layers:

curves (automatic option) (gif 2) >> same curves layer (tweaks) (gif 3) >> brightness & contrast (gif 4) >> hue/saturation (tweaked cyan+blue+green) >> selective color >> color balance (gif 5) >> b&w gradient map >> (sepia) filter >> vibrance (gif 6)

i added a hue/saturation layer to remove the blues & greens before my selective color layer because i thought that was more urgent than tweaking the tint of all colors. color balance (gif 4) was the real hero here, though, by removing the green tint. the selective color layer was meant to make the red pop more than anything else, because the rest looked pretty good, especially her skin tone (despite the green tint). you can notice that tweaking the curves layer (small gif 3) also helped A LOT with the green problem.

tl;dr 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

here's a list of my go-to's while coloring and lightning gifs. it's not a rule, just a guide. there are gifs in which i don't use all these adjustment layers, or use them in a different order. it all depends!

1. curves (automatic option + tweaks) 2. brightness & contrast 3. channel mixer 4. selective color 5. hue/saturation 6. color balance 7. b&w gradient map 8. color filter 9. vibrance

i'll suggest that you study each adjustment layer listed for more info, either with other Tumblr tutorials or YouTube ones. the YouTube ones focus on images, but you can translate what they teach to gif making very easily. you can ask me to further explain any adjustment layer, too! i was brief to keep this short (which i kinda failed lol).

feel free to ask me for clarification or something else about gifmaking wise, i always like to help. ❤️

[eddiediaaz]

hi!! would you mind doing a tutorial on how you add subtitles to your gifs?

hey, sure! :)

with the text tool selected, i will draw a box that is as wide as the gif and type my text. i created an action that selects all the right settings for me so it's faster and my subtitles always look the same.

arial rounded bold is a very popular choice for subtitles, and it looks awesome, but i' always've been using the font calibri bold italic for years now. here are my usual settings for a 540px wide gif:

i usually keep the font size and leading value the same, if i change it from 18 pt. and sometimes i'll play around with the anti-aliasing method, whatever looks best for this particular gif. this will help make your text look less crispy or soft, depending on which filtering method you use. the other settings i pretty much always leave like that for subtitles.

as for colors, i always go with white first, and if there's another character talking, i will give their subtitles a different color. i usually try to pick a bright pastel color found in the gif, or even on the character's clothing (just because i like to match things haha).

it's also important to leave a bit of a gap on the sides and bottom, so the text doesn't go all the way to the edges (as shown in the next example). it's definitely harder to read text if it's too close together, or goes from edge to edge. you can push words on another line if it becomes too close to the edge, and you can nudge the text from the bottom with the arrow keys.

as for the layer style, i'm adding a black stroke and black drop shadow (by double clicking the text layer). the stroke almost never changes, but i'll edit the drop shadow accordingly with the gif. if it's a very busy gif, the drop shadow should be thicker to help with visibility.

and that's it! :D

[orykorioart]

Here’s another ‘redraw’ of sorts, ft. my beloved Team Sweet Flips! (AKA TAZ sapphic ships my beloved)

Once again, I realized that I never posted this 2021 piece, but in looking at it again I wanted to redraw it (and I am always in the mood to draw more dragons) sooooo…..

(I like the idea of date-night Killian doing hair up and wearing a cute blouse, but also still accessorizing with some armor, lol)

[mercymaker]

A couple of general gif-making tips for anyone trying out the craft!

When resizing your footage, always leave yourself a couple of pixels for margins.

I see a lot of people make this mistake when it comes to making gifs, where they resize their footage to the exact dimensions of the end gif. However, that almost always results in the pixels closest to the outside border going semi-transparent, which when saved as gif results in gifs having these tiny 'borders'.

I zoomed in a bit, but you can see that the outer edge has a line. Those are the semi-transparent pixels.

To avoid that AND leave yourself some wiggle room when it comes to moving screenshots or cropping, resize your footage to the target dimensions and add +2, +4 or +10 pixels to the number. After resizing you can then crop away the margins which will result in cleaner edges and will get rid of the transparent border.

For example, tumblr's full-post width is 540px so if I were resizing say 1080p footage, I'd put the width as 544px or 550px and then crop the edges (I use canvas size option for this) to 540px.

Make sure to use proper dimensions!

Tumblr will automatically resize your gifs to set dimensions and if your gifs are shorter or wider than those sizes, you will lose quality and sharpness in your gifs.

Ava (@anya-chalotra) has an excellent guide on dimensions and gif sharpness (as well as some other excellent information in giffing department) that goes into exact numbers.

I mostly make gifs that are full width, so they're always 540px wide.

Be aware of the size limit

According to tumblr's own guide, the general max limit is 10MB. However, anything over 3MB will be compressed by tumblr. That can result in quality loss, but most gif-makers ignore the compression and try to 'squeeze' out as much as possible out of a gif.

Some tips on how to lower your gif size to fit within the limit:

Reduce the number of frames.

Try to restrict the colors used to a selection (I usually try to have one or two dominant colors). Gif format only supports 256 colors anyway, so if you try to include all the colors of the rainbow, things might look wonky anyway.

Darken parts of your gif (usually brighter gifs tend to take up more space, so adding some darker shades can help reduce the file size).

[rinirosed]

lizzie coming to hermitcraft real guys

designing joel and coloring him was so hard oh my lord also ignore how much more detail was obviously put into lizzie can we actually like not talk about that rn

[rookedcrow]

"GODS ARE STUBBORN. SO AM I." euripides emilia de riva, probably.

𝑹𝑶𝑶𝑲𝑬𝑫𝑪𝑹𝑶𝑾 an independent & selective headcanon driven interpretation of human!rogue emilia "rook" de riva from bio.ware's 𝐃𝐑𝐀𝐆𝐎𝐍 𝐀𝐆𝐄 : 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐕𝐄𝐈𝐋𝐆𝐔𝐀𝐑𝐃. unaffiliated with the DA fandom at large. contracted by willow.

[sugurugetos]

MUSIC BANK.PSD a very rough and one-size-fits all type of psd intended for kbs music bank interviews! the examples i've used all have the same psd with no adjustments on them, however if necessary you might have to tweak colour balance! 💗 PSD HERE. 🕯️

[teh-nos]

"are people not into that?" i ask, after posting my weird niche shit to the internet, despite knowing it to be weird niche shit.

[inkedover]

ughhhh Two Time is rotting my brain rn for no apparent reason so have a little story I thought up about them <3333

TW: blood, semi-graphic (or maybe graphic) descriptions of gore (methinks), and character death (I guess mention/brief death??? Sorry I'm not too good with TWs).

Running and running and running. That was how every round was, dodging and dipping and dashing and ducking. All the same, never different, just loop again and again and again.

It drives people insane, this unchanging flow of time and time and time again. Each and every face was just a blur against the background. Every survivor, destined to die again and again, only to come back renewed. Every killer, destined to be painted in blood, the red substance bathing their souls am eternal red as they did this song and dance again. And again. And again.

A machete. Skin tearing. Two Time could feel their stomach tearing open, vision blurring as Jason tore into their flesh. Their blood poured down their legs, puddling underneath them as they struggled to get away.

Out of stamina. Out in the open. Guts beginning to spill out of their chest cavity, sloshing onto the ground below in a messy soup of crimson liquid and viscera. Two Time hated the smell of iron, the feeling of their body being torn apart, the metallic taste of blood beginning to permeate the air.

However, new beginnings arose for them again, like they always did. It was never fun feeling their life force fading, blinking in and out like a faulty light, before suddenly coming back to them in one sharp breath. It took Two Time's breath away, but their feet had already begun desperately running away from the killer, leaving their brain to catch up in their daze.

[ashedrose]

so you've got a lotta blogs, but not a lotta patience to be signing in and out between em? i'm about to save your life !!

i. let's start with the email trick!

ps: i have only ever done it with gmail. if you use a different one, give it a try anyway! but i can vouch that it does work for gmail. it's super simple: youremail@gmail.com -> youremail+musename@gmail.com you just add +musename and you can create a new tumblr account while still having everything in the same email account! (you do this during the "sign up" component on tumblr, not your email! it'll automatically add it to your email. you can also add the +musename part to your email in account settings)

ii. now, multiple sign ins!

google chrome: profiles! on your browser, up top, right next to the settings you'll see a button for the profile attached to that browser. when you click it, you'll see the existing profile, and the option to "add" a new one. each profile is its own browser page, which allows you to sign onto a different tumblr account in each! i like to name mine according to the muse it belongs to so i can keep track. firefox: there's an extension called 'containers' which allows you to have multiple sign ins on the same site open!

if you've got any other tips to ease the process of having multiple muses and blogs, feel free to let me know and i'll add it to this!

i hope this helps! let me know if it does or if you've got questions about it!

happy roleplaying <3

[chikoriita]

Hello! I’d love to start giffing the actors from Abbott Elementary and was wondering if you had any psds already or tips on how to colour, because the last thing I’d like to do it whitewash! Thank you.

How exciting! I adore Abbott, and I'm glad you're gonna gif for it.

I avoid using coloring PSDs because from my experience, there's not really one PSD that fits every scene, character, or actor. My best advice is to play around and see how you adjust to coloring. Another thing is to always have a reference of what the actors look like in real life so you can check to see if your coloring is accurate.

Here are some guides to help avoid color/white washing:

@zoyanazyalensky guide to avoid orange washing

@jeonwonwoo how to avoid pink/yellow washing

I hope this helps!

[your-fave-is-bi]

picked up yakuza 0 again bc seeing new majima game hype made me crave playing cabaret czar and also i never finished this game back when i first played it and i gotta say

having a blast. meandering around. seeing the sights. instinctively ending up at the club sunshine doorstep again.

soon my beloved...soon

[undertow1326]

learning of things ive never known

[briar--rising]

Extensive non-graphic discussion of suicide (I'm fine, I'm not suicidal, don't worry). Also lots of maternal enmeshment talk

Therapy today was rough. I'm doing so much better in so many ways, but that doesn't mean the trauma is gone lol. I do so well in early spring, and then May and June comes and I can taste death in the air. I won't let it pull me under this year, I refuse to spiral into long-lasting psychosis and lose my progress until next February again. But it's still difficult.

My mother is. Fucked up. Obviously. But something that I realized in today's session was that her dream scenario is still the two of us committing suicide together in the end. And that's. Well. It feels bad.

A few weeks ago she brought up again how she wants to commit suicide when she gets very old/sick, or if the world goes to a very bad place. And the reason she insists on bringing this up with me is that she's very clear that it will be my responsibility to make sure she gets the assisted suicide she wants someday. Basically, asking me to kill her one day. And today was the anniversary of my uncle's suicide, and in about a month it will be the anniversary of my mom's suicide attempt when I was 11, and so it's all just...been on my mind. And we talked today in therapy about how the fact that my mom attempted suicide shortly before my birthday was especially damaging for me, and how basically being the one to find her that day but then not being allowed to see her for a while in the hospital once she woke up was deeply traumatic. And it's all just. Tangled together in my head.

I've known for years that I'll be in charge of making sure my mom gets the assisted suicide she wants, she's made that very clear to me. And I do not want that responsibility, but I just always knew/assumed it would be my job. And I was talking about that with my therapist today and she was like "I think it would be very dangerous for you to do that. You will always have a tendency towards psychosis, and there is already so much tangled up in you and your mother and annihilation and death and loss of self, and I do not think it will ever be safe for you to help her with that." And I realized she was right, but it literally hadn't occurred to me that I was allowed to not be the one to help with that? But like. I don't have to. A friend of hers can do it. My brother can do it. Someone, anyone who isn't me can help her find a doctor and get what she needs someday. I do not have to kill my mother. I do not have to kill myself.

Because I know in her dream scenario we'd do it together, and/or my doing it for her would push me to do it to myself. First of all, she's literally suggested it before. Second of all, she cannot cope with or even begin to comprehend the fact that I am separate from her and that I would dare to live without her. We were talking today about how my mom's relationship feels almost parasitic, like she's drawing on me to sustain herself, and how I was worried that by cutting her off and having increasing boundaries I was hurting her by taking away her access to her life force. And my therapist was like, "No, because those boundaries are real for you, but not for her. Consciously she sort of accepts them, but in her mind you are still completely enmeshed. What do you think would happen if you asked to move back in with her?" And I was like, "She'd be thrilled, she'd start working towards it immediately." And she was like, "Exactly. If she was developing the type of boundaries you are, she would have reservations about her adult child moving back in. But she doesn't have any of those boundaries, and still believes and feels you to be as close as you were, so you're not hurting her by having those boundaries internally, because she will never be able to share them or even truly understand that you have them." So that was helpful, if disturbing in its own way. Bc it also made me realize how deeply enmeshed we still are on her end, and how clear it is from that and from several things she's said over the years including quite recently that she wants us to kill ourselves together someday.

But I won't. I refuse. When she wants to die she can find someone else to help her manage it, and I will not be joining her. I will not let her annihilate me in life or death.

[henwilsons]

Okay, I have to ask... In your latest buddie set... The "in the middle" gif is the coolest thing I've ever seen. How did you do that?

I'm guessing that you created the squares and turned them into two Smart Objects (the bw group and the pink group), then attached the two scenes to them using a clipping mask? Am I right? I've been staring at it like a lizard in a terrarium, lmao.

Literally one of the most beautiful sets I've ever seen.

oh my god this is SO sweet thank you so much ♡ that gif was very much inspired by this gorgeous set! i didn't really do it in the way you described (but that also seems like a solid way of doing it!!) <3

what i did was:

i made both my gifs, and put them on the same canvas + i added a layer mask to the gif on top (which was the pink gif for me, but any order would have worked!)

i created a guide layout (by going to view -> guides -> new guide layout) with 5 rows and 5 columns; the guide layout forms a grid!

i planned out what squares i wanted to have show which gifs

using the rectangle select tool, i selected the squares i wanted to show the bottom gif, and deleted the selection from the layer mask of the top gif so that it would show the gif below it; this is another step which the guide layout is helpful for! it makes it super easy to select squares + ensures symmetry!

i then added the horizontal and vertical lines (each line had a white fill, 0.2 px width, no stroke, and the line layers were set to 85% opacity) and aligned them using the guide layout

finally i removed the guide layout! and then added my text

this is what my final layers panel looked like!

i hoped this helped you in some way, please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any other questions! ♡