HOW I TRY TO AVOID WHITEWASHING MY GIFS (FOR THE PITT)
hey! so, the show i've undoubtedly been giffing the most lately is the pitt, which features a whole lot of characters of color! it also happens to be a show with mostly white & cool toned backgrounds and bright lighting. unfortunately, those are circumstances in which it can become really easy for gifs to slide into whitewashing territory - whitewashing in this case meaning that characters of color are colored to be a lot lighter than they were in the unedited version of the scene.
DISCLAIMER: these are some examples of whitewashing that i encounter in my gifmaking process and actively try to avoid. this is by no means comprehensive, nor am i any kind of authority on what does or does not constitute whitewashing. furthermore, i myself have an issue where gifs look surprisingly different on tumblr on my pc vs my tablet, so truly, i think it can even depend on what device you're viewing gifs on. there are some cases that are pretty straightforward to me, but sometimes my tablet makes gifs - that looked perfectly fine on my computer - suddenly look kind of too pale.
TO NON-GIFMAKERS: absolutely feel free to look at these examples and if gifs strike you as way too pale for what you saw on screen just consider not interacting with that set. maybe you might even shoot the creator an ask/reply telling them that they may have veered into whitewashing.
okay, now that that's out of the way, let's just take a quick look at what i mean when i say whitewashing - let's look at this (extreme, cartoonish) example:
now you might say, "that's absurd, nobody would color it that way," but the thing is, something like this in different forms is easier to get to while coloring a gif than one might think.
and both skin tones (again... duh) and lighting can differ drastically from character to character and scene to scene. i've tried to assemble a few gifs of different characters of color to explain what i try to avoid and how i avoid it when i color.
BRIGHTNESS & CURVES
the most obvious and probably the most widespread (i think) thing is that when you originally screencap a show/import a video into photoshop, it's kinda dark. it just looks nicer to most gifmakers when we make it a little brighter. the issue with that can come when we do too much with our curve or brightness layers.
(the little circles show shades that i picked with the color picker tool at hopefully pretty much the same spot for all four gifs)
so you can see that i'm a bit of a hypocrite - i made her lighter with my standard psd! that's why i say that i personally think this is a matter of degrees. as far as i'm aware the difference between the unedited and second gif that shows how i usually color is within the margins. it's still fairly vibrant and brown whereas with the two lower gifs i'm firmly in pink/light beige territory (which is not sepideh moafi's skin color).
this one's pretty easy to avoid, in my opinion: just don't go too far with curves or brightness. i try to keep it in that margin that still approximates the color of the unedited version.
THE BLUES & GREENS
i feel like this is the most complex one. like i said, the pitt is a show with a lot of blue in the background and what can happen is that in trying to make those colors pop or reducing reds & yellows, we distort skin tones maybe a little too much.
layers this can become an issue in: selective color, color balance, levels, channel mixer, hue/saturation.
how i try to avoid this:
selective color: the red & yellow tabs of selective colors are crucial to me here. in those, i try not to increase the cyan or decrease the magenta or yellow too much -> of course it depends on the scene! if it's a very yellow scene, i can probably decrease the yellows of red or yellow without running the risk of actual whitewashing
levels: i usually keep my hands off the individual color levels for this - that's just a personal preference, though. if used, i'd apply the rules of color balance and channel mixer
color balance: i pretty much only use "shadows" and "lights" for color balance and here i try to take care with the cyan/red slider (and in some rare instances the yellow/blue slider) -> too much cyan and i create that pink-ish hue in the spots where the light hits the character, and that doesn't really belong there; with other characters too much cyan almost bleaches them out
channel mixer: no increasing reds in the green or the blue channel, basically
i made another example for this in combination with increased curves/brightness:
VIBRANCE
i don't see this one as often anymore because the pale gif trend was years and years ago (and personally, i'll never participate in it again bc i didn't like it), but for completion's sake i wanted to include it because pale gifs had a HUGE whitewashing problem.
as you can see, victoria looks sort of grey and ashy in the bottom two gifs. if you add more brightness/curves on top of that it becomes very, very pale which was sort of the trend for a while.
again, easy to avoid because i have to add a hue/saturation or vibrance layer and drag the dials into the negatives.
PALE COLOR GRADED/LIGHTING SCENES
sometimes the show does the deed itself, although i'm not super sure if that can still be qualified as whitewashing. in any case, sometimes i'll load screencaps into photoshop and go, "why does she look so pale??? i've giffed her before and she didn't remotely look like this."
at that point, i come to kind of a crossroad - do i try to color correct in addition to my usual coloring or do i just proceed as normal and go off of the skin tone presented to me in the scene?
i skew towards the latter... the top two look bad To Me but i don't know if there's an actual right answer to this conundrum, to be honest.
and that's it for now!! i hope this is maybe a little helpful? again, this is not meant to encompass everything or even go into much detail on individual colorings but moreso the general considerations i try to make when i gif. i hope it makes sense! tysm for reading!!
anon asked me for a tutorial on how i made this gifset so here it is!
note: i pay for photoshop and currently own the most recently released version - some things might be different if you’re working on earlier versions of photoshop
tutorial under the cut!
step 1 – making the base gifs
the first step will be to make your four base gifs as you usually do, for this tutorial i'll be using just this one gif (my wife <3) bc i'm lazy :)
step 2 – coloring the gifs
the next step will be to color the gif you've made! using my previous tutorial on how to change the background color in a gif, i gave my gif a light blue background!
step 3 – adding the film strip
once you're done and have the gif in timeline mode, we'll add in a film strip png - i used this one below and made it b&w but there's loads more pngs you can find in places such as pinterest!
simply adjust the timeline length of the png layer, and place it how you want it in your gif - for my set i tilted it slightly (i also had to drag the gif in the bg up a little bit so that his entire face would still be in frame)
step 4 – adding shapes
now by using the rectangle tool (found on the left hand sidebar, pictured below) we'll be adding in a rectangle roughly the shape of one frame in the film strip
after adding in the rectangle, i zoom my workspace in to about 300% to make the rectangle match up with the frame in the film strip as accurately as i can
as soon as i feel it fits well enough, i just duplicate the layer two times and drag it over to cover the other two frames
you might still have to edit the other two rectangle layers to fit the film strip frames better, but as you can see i don't go into super detail as there's still a few pixels of the original film strip visible at the edges
step 5 - adding the three bottom gifs
as said, i'll be working with one gif so i just copy pasted the base gif layer - but what you want to do is just simply drag your other gifs (make sure they're in timeline mode) over to the one you're working in
then place the gifs on top of the film strip frames the way you want them to turn out (like below)
make sure that the gif layers are always right on top of their corresponding rectangle layers! this is important because we'll be creating a clipping mask for all the gif layers - you can do this by clicking cmd/ctrl + alt + g or by right clicking on the gif layer and choosing "create clipping mask"
once you do this you go from your film strip frames looking like above, to them looking like below
and that's it, really! you're now ready to save your gif :)
(it looks a bit silly bc i reused the same gif 4 times but you get the image!)
for those interested, i saved the original psd for this set and i've shared it here so all you have to do is replace the existing gifs with your own! i've renamed all the layers to make it as clear as possible and removed my personal watermark so it can be used publicly! all i'm asking is to not steal the psd and claim it's your own, thank you! <3
