#coloring poc

[aubrey-plaza]

tutorial below the cut!

How to fix orange-washed characters

recently I’ve been seeing a lot of this

and not enough of this

and I get it, I really do.

Making vibrantly coloured gifs with black and brown actors can sometimes present unique challenges, doubly so when the source material is lit with a candle one scene and with disco lights the next.

A lot of the time, in an effort to avoid whitewashing actors, gifmakers will instead (accidentally) over-saturate them and end up with orange-washed actors.

so I thought I’d share two quick methods I learned while giffing Lovecraft Country (aka a show with a black cast varying in shades, and with the most random and worst lighting I’ve ever had the pleasure of giffing)

They’re both super simple and can be used almost universally (together or individually) to tone down the orange hue when making vibrantly coloured gifs.

Method 1: using the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer

This is my go-to adjustment.

I’ve gone ahead and made my gif, sharpened and put some basic colouring on there (my usual mix is curves-selective color-hue/saturation).

This is what I’m left with:

You can see that he looks way more orange that he should

what I do than is go in with my hue/saturation layer and isolate the Reds. I lower the saturation down (in this case all the way to -30) and sometimes I even fiddle with the lightness (just to keep the gifs true to skintone).

If their features become a little washed out in terms of colour, instead of upping the red again or the overall saturation, I like to use a vibrance layer. It doesn’t add colour so much as it makes it pop a little bit more.

So my coloured gif, with these settings:

gets you this:

and here’s a side by side with no adjustment layers:

another example: (without the adjustment on the left, and with on the right)

I know there will be scenarios in which your actor is in a very red scene and lowering the red saturation can affect the entire gif. In those cases I like to use layer masks and a soft brush to only remove the reds from skin (instead of the entire gif).

And if it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work. I think especially when it’s clear that the scene is incredibly red, people will be more understanding and at the end of the day, it’s up to you to decide what looks best!

Method 2: using the Selective Colour adjustment layer

I like using this method for more subtle cases; where the colouring looks alright but adding a selective colour layer to it will just push it that last bit to looking Great.

Take this gif, for example:

It’s pretty good but look what happens when I add a selective colour layer with these values:

It’s a minor change but it looks much more true to the actor’s skin colour.

So there you have it. The quick and easy way to make sure you don’t make your actors look orange! Be sure to play around with the settings to see what suits your gif the best, since no two actors are the same, and more than anything be sure to have fun!

(if this tutorial helps you in any way, please REBLOG it)

And if you have any questions or if there’s anything confusing in this tutorial, my inbox is always open! :)

[aubrey-plaza]

could you do a tutorial on how you did the coloring for rebecca jessel going into the lake for flora? I tried coloring that scene and decided I'd rather die

bold of you to assume i didnt want to die myself, anon alsdhajhdaldh but okay I’ll walk you through my process.

I use CC 2018 and I import the clip and colour before flattening to frames and exporting. Let’s talk colouring this scene under the cut:

Usually I try to find any white point to put a curves layer on a scene and adjust the colours like that but this scene doesn’t have that 💀so at first i had a minor breakdown over it and came back to it. 

I just went to town on levels:

my next step with colouring any gif is to then add a selective colour layer where I’ll use the Black slider for Neutrals and Blacks to add contrast and darkness (and make whites whiter but that’s useless in this scene).

result: 

next step: colour balance!

because the scene is so blue I really had a lot of fixing to do:

result: 

a big danger with colouring (and *especially* with characters of colour) is washing out characters and I know the lighting in Bly Manor is awful to begin with but small things can make all the difference to avoid whitewashing characters. So next step on this gif was vibrance and hue/saturation:

result: 

a sidenote on colouring poc: a lot of the time I see gorgeous colourings in a gif but then the character of colour is either washed out or made too red/orange (which can so easily happen if you try to add colours to a gif). The trick here is to use your vibrance adjustment layer with hue/sat. 

I know you’re here asking about Bly Manor but I learned so much about giffing poc from making Lovecraft Country gifs and what works really well is selecting the hue/sat and selecting the red and dragging the right side of the slider to include some of the orange (and sometimes even yellow) and de-saturating that, but then adding a ton of vibrance (like, at least 40) to the whole gif. You’ll get a nice colourful gif where your characters of colour don’t look overly orange or red!

here’s what I’m talking about:

^ this is the gif without any colouring

^ this is the gif where I only used hue/sat to adjust colours

^ this is a gif where I reduced the redness with hue/sat and added a vibrance layer to it. You can see that he looks a lot less red in the final gif without loss to overall colour. 

okay /tangent over. Back to Rebecca!

I decided that the scene was still very blue and I knew I’d be putting it next to a more yellow scene so I wanted it a bit more green so I used colour balance to add some more green in the mid-tones and the gif looked a little dull still so I put on another vibrance adjustment layer set to +45. 

result: 

slap your text on there and viola we’re left with:

also a final note: I managed to hide a LOT of the sins by making it a 268 gif instead of a 540 gif. The bigger the gif, the more obvious the issues are so a lot of the graininess is hidden by the fact that it’s just a smaller gif. 

Hope that helps!