Here is a small tutorial on how to color GIF's! As a disclaimer I am not an expert at this.
Notes before this:
I intentionally chose an easy GIF to work with, some are a lot harder.
The final GIF (Heavy PSD) has been used in a stimboard that can be found here.
The layout of this is so messy, I apologize for this.
The Image ID's explain the color features changes in a lot more detail.
This post is GIF heavy and contains GIF's that are eye strain based.
GIF one tutorial- Light PSD
PT: GIF one tutorial- Light PSD
Okay, this is often the easiest thing you can do with a GIF which has a distinguishable color.
What do I mean by this? There is no other objects on the screen that is blue besides the OP's painted nails (which are minimal).
If the background was blue, changing the colors would possibly make it look less 'realistic'.
How do you use Hue/Saturation?
With a handy tool known as 'Hue and Saturation', it's one of the most useful tools at your disposal.
It can be found under: Layer > New adjustment Layer > Hue and Saturation.
Then this will pop up. Now it's important that you change the 'Master' to whatever color you're trying to change.
Things to note:
Orange is an awkward color to work with.
Blue is often cyan.
Sometimes the two colors merge together.
Yellow and red can often affect lighter skin tones of the hands/person in the GIF.
What do all of the options mean?
The hue changes the color of the GIF.
The saturation changes how bright/saturated the color is
The Lightness adds darkness or lightness to the color
All you need to do is mess around with the colors until you get one you like!
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GIF two tutorial- Heavy PSD
The same rules apply here! Distinguishable colors are easier to work with.
How do you create this?
Sadly there is no definitive answer. You can use literally anything from the 'new adjustment layer' list. I'm going to admit that I don't use a lot of these besides Brightness and Contrast, Vibrance, Hue/Saturation, and Selective Color.
Wish me luck as I try to explain what these do.
Brightness and Contrast
This changes the brightness and contrast of the image. The best way to describe this is that brightness will make the image lighter or darker, eventually either making it completely black or white depending on how much you add.
Contrast is how much difference there is between colors.
Vibrance (and saturation)
This category adds both vibrance and saturation to the mix. They both have different styles but they're similar.
Vibrance is a lighter version of Saturation, it makes the image more 'vibrant'.
Saturation turns up the saturation, making the GIF's colors brighter.
Hue and lightness
Hue- Changes the color of the selected original color
Lightness- Adds white or black to the original color
I would always use the selective color option for this (talked about in 'Light PSD' one).
Selective Color
Selective color is hard to use, I only use the 'back' 'white' and sometimes 'neutral' option in the top corner (shown below)
It increases the colors that are shown, ie the black GIF increases the black color so it's clearer. 'Natural' does this with all of the neutral colors, but you can also add other colors to it, such as adding more red.
How do I achieve a good GIF?
Sadly you literally just have to mess around with all of these (often times multiple times) to achieve a random color that you enjoy. Here are the ones we used in the initial GIF:
I consider myself relatively knowledgeable on GIF making, but I am not an expert. This tutorial mainly focuses on making GIF's and sharpening, for a PSD tutorial see here.
A few things to note before starting:
I struggle with sharpening GIF's- Especially real-life GIF's. For some reason I can't quite wrap my head around when/if the GIF's look too sharpened, so the tutorial part on this may seem lackluster.
I only use photopea and ezgif for GIF editing and capcut for cutting videos. I won't be able to answer questions about other software's (ie photoshop).
Tumblr has a GIF size limit of 10MB. It's the bane of my life. Always check how big your GIF is.
And with no other questions let's begin.
How to make a GIF from a video
Find the video and download it (real life)
This is a very obvious step but one that is important. I would always recommend finding videos in good quality. I often use tiktok, free videos from sites (like pixabay) and Instagram.
As for downloading them, I would recommend avoiding '[website] downloader' sites for a few reasons. A) they get shut down and replaced with spam sites frequently, thus making them unsafe to use, and B) they often times make you watch an add or remove ad blocker before giving you the highest quality download option.
I would always use cobalt.tools for video downloading.
Find the video and download it (anime)
This is more complex and I won't detail my download methods publicly. All I can say is not to use the anime watch sites to download your videos from, they're often low quality and have watermarks- Plus a lot of the sites have pop-ups ect which make them unsafe.
If you want a video tutorial I can't link you one from YouTube. This is not a YouTube tutorial. Nope.
Anyway, once you have it you will need to use capcut to shorten the video length (and potentially change the file) however you will need to make an account. Annoying I am aware, but it's the best video cutting software I know of and has caused 0 issues for me.
Not that when I first used captut the video save settings had the video at 720 pixels, however you want 1080 pixels because it makes everything smoother and higher quality. Once you change this setting you don't have to change it again.
Make the GIF
I always use Ezgif for this part. You need to use the video to GIF option and upload your video. Then choose the length of the video you want to turn into a GIF.
You will be met with a screen like this under the video.
Frankly I do not know what all of this means so that's why I only edit the size and frame rate.
With the size, you don't want it too big, smaller gives you more wiggle room for size with tumblrs size limit. However, with anime videos there's often less colors/detail, so they can be bigger and still look good.
The frame rate is important, the higher the frame rate the better quality it is, so regardless of GIF always have it this size
Then you hit convert to GIF and there you go.
If you need to crop the GIF use the crop tool and if there's any points of the video you don't want (ie frames of the next scene) you can use the frames tool (note that imo it's easier to use the photopea timeline for this)
Editing the GIF
You can just leave the GIF as it is, or you can make it sharper and/or add a PSD in photopea.
For stim gifs I will simply direct you to this tutorial because I can't understand the irl GIF sharpening process without photoshop's tools.
However, for anime ones you can use the smart sharpen tool, I either leave it on the default setting, or turn down the radius to 0.1-0.5
You can find the sharpening tool in filters > sharpen > smart sharpen
And here are some comparisons.
I spoke about PSD's here, but here's an example of the GIF with one and sharpened.
