What website/software do you use to create your gifs? They're always such good quality.
hello! I’m so sorry for only getting round to answering this now, it’s been sitting in my inbox for months and since you sent it I’ve completely changed the platform I make my gifs on. I’m now using photoshop cc 2018 but the gifs you must have been referring to were made using completely different, free and accessible software/websites. There’s a lot of photoshop tutorials out there but less so for other options so I’ve decided to just go through my previous process in the hopes that someone will find it useful!
To be honest, the differences between my gifs BP (before photoshop) and AP (after photoshop) aren’t that huge as long as the video quality is good. It’s easier to add subtitles, to colour and to play around with the gif size/quality, but there’s no need to give your soul away to adobe to create good gifs there’s obviously always the possibility of downloading ps less legally which i of course would never in a million years do. So, to create gifs as I did BP you will need three different things:
a screen recorder (I use QuickTime Player which is preinstalled on a mac but there are many others out there, and then VLC player if I had already downloaded the video which didn’t happen often as I mostly gif matches so I’d just screen record parts of the match if I couldn’t download it)
a video editor (I used iMovie which again is preinstalled on macs but there are other options out there if you have a poke around - if necessary this step can also be skipped but it’s useful and will improve gif quality)
the lord and saviour ezgif.com (a free website at everyone’s fingertips which provides many of the features you can get with ps)
1A. Screen recording: have the part of the video you want to record on your screen, open up QuickTime Player, right click on the image of the app in your dock, then click on “new screen recording”. You can then click on the arrow pointing down to change your sound settings, I usually have mine like this
click on the circle with smaller red circle (play button) after which these instructions will appear across your screen: “click to record the full screen. Drag to record part of the screen. End recording by clicking the stop button in the bar menu”. So you can chose to record your full screen or just a part of it depending on whether you click or drag. If you drag you are then given the opportunity to adjust the area you want to record and then you press “start recording. Once you have finished recording the part you want to gif, click on the circle with a black square inside (stop button) in the menu bar at the top of your screen. Go to file > save and then save the video in whatever file and under whatever name you want. After this you will have finished step one!
1B. The alternative, if rather than screen recording a video you haven’t downloaded you want to record a certain part of an already downloaded video then you can use software such as VLC (you can also just upload the video directly to iMovie and crop it there but if it’s very long/you don’t want to go through the middle step then you may want to consider this as an option). Go to Finder for the video you’ve downloaded, right click on it then Open with > VLC. Find the part you wish to use for your gif, go to Playback > Record like so.
It will immediately start recording what’s playing, stopping when you click on Record again once the part you want to gif is over. Then step one method two is done!
2. iMovie: as ezgif isn’t the best for colouring, and anything that it does do is pretty slow and arduous, then I used iMovie to shorten, slow down and colour my videos before turning them into gifs. Here I go Create New > Movie > File > Import Media. I find the video(s) I want to use to make gifs, click import and then drag and drop them into the timeline.
Usually I try to make my gifs about 3 second long, so first thing I would do is change the speed from normal to about 70/80% (this is a completely individual choice though!) so these would be my current settings
Then I find the exact bits I want to gif and divide them into individual clips, as I said they’re usually 3 second long but it can vary. This is done by right clicking on the part of the video you want your gif to start and clicking on “Split Clip”, and again at the point you want your gif to end. Repeat for however many gifs you want. Simply delete the parts of the video(s) you don’t want to keep after this is done.
Now I attempt to add some colouring. First I go to “Colour Correction” which is in the same bar “Speed” is - it’s the little artist’s palette. I play around with the different toggles a little bit until I find something which I believe works. This honestly varies so much from gif to gif but usually I up the saturation just a lil bit, leave the temperature as it is and darken the video so that it ends up a bit like this but honestly it fluctuated a lot and it’s all about personal preference.
If I’m feeling funky I’ll also mess about with the “Colour Balance” which is under the first icon on the left which is a half white circle. I use the eye dropper to change the skin tone balance and sometimes the “White Balance” eye dropper which is a simplified version of ‘curves’ in photoshop.
Once you’re happy with how your video looks then save it by going to File > Share > File. Name it and, if possible save it in as high a quality as possible. My settings usually look something like this
click Next > Save and step two is finished!!
3. Actually making the gif using ezgif.com/video-to-gif. Go to “Choose Files” and select the video you want to gif, then click “Upload Video!”. Chose the time frame you want for your gif, the size (the x540 one which says for Tumblr is the one to use if you’re uploading them onto here), the frame rate (the more per second the better the quality but also the bigger the gif size). All of this is also very well explained by ezgif at the bottom of the page so I’d definitely recommend having a read through all that. Then click “Convert To GIF!”.
From here you can either ‘crop’ to make the gif a particular size or use other tools such as ‘effects’, ‘speed’ or ‘optimise’ if you didn’t use iMovie or want to make some further changes. I usually only use the ‘crop’ as iMovie won’t let you change the dimensions of the gif whilst here you can do that. However I mostly stay away from the other tools as I find them a bit clunky and annoying to use. Once you’re happy with the final product click “Save” and hey presto your gif has been downloaded and is ready to be used!!
I hope some/all of this helped and feel free to hmu with any questions you might have if anything isn't explained that well. It took me ages to write this because I'm never sure whether these explanations make sense outside of the realms of my brain :)))
Here's the second in my new series How NOT to Color Comics! This Photoshop tutorial covers shifting your hues and avoiding boring light and shadow colors. :)
This is one of my favourite colouring techniques. I haven’t done it on this blog yet, but it’s my go to colouring. This works on a majority of screen caps and gifs. The only thing it won’t work on is dark blue scenes.
This is the imagine I am starting with.
Step 1) The first thing I do is add a colour lookup. Colour lookup is always one of my go to ways to help with colouring. It helps bring out the colours you want. In this case I want my gif more red than yellow so I am adding 2strip.look which comes with photoshop.
so now I have this.
Nothing too exciting yet, but it had cancelled out a lot of the yellow in the gif. Depending on the gif, 2strip also brings out the cyans in a gif.
Step 2) The next thing I want to do is brighten my gif. I am going to be adding a levels layer and a curves layer
Levels: 15, 1.47, 255
For curves I just hit auto to brighten it just a little bit more. Brighten it until you are happy with how it looks.
This is how mine looks after the level and curve layers
Step 3) Now comes the fun colouring part. We want to enhance the reds in the gifs so we are going to be adding a selective colour layer.
Just incase there are cyans/blues in picture, we want to enhance them too. Unfortunately there aren’t any in this gifs, but at the end I will show you some that do
Step 4) The last thing I do is add a hue/saturation layer. As much as I love to add vibrancy, hue/saturation works a lot better with this colouring.
Red: +20
Yellow: +41
Cyan: +20
Finally add a smart sharpen to your gif and I also add a reduce noise to my gifs and screen caps as well... And that is it. This is my final product.
Make sure you play around to make it fit your gif/screencap. My settings may not fit with yours.
Here are some examples of what else I’ve used this on:
one | two | three | four
Extras:
Want to add more red and brighten it more: add more red in your hue/sat layer + play around in the red section of your selective colour layer until you are happy.
I have this now after playing around with hue/sat + selective colour
Now I am going to brighten it more by adding another selective colour layer:
Neutral: Black: -20
Black: Black: +10
I also added more red in my hue/sat layer again. I now have this
liked this tutorial? please let me know via my inbox. it will mean a lot xo
Live Q&A celebrating 10K YouTube subscribers Thursday night!
I'd like to invite you to attend a live Q&A that I'll be streaming Thursday, January 28, 2016, at 8pm Central US in celebration of reaching 10,000 YouTube subscribers! That's 6pm Pacific, 7pm Mountain, 9pm Eastern for the time-zone challenged! :)
Thanks to all of you that subscribe there or have supported me in my courses. It's cliche, but I literally couldn't do it without you!
Feel free to come ask me about whatever you like--coloring, comic book industry or business stuff, or just ask me about my cats or something. It should last about an hour or so, give or take, but I'll stay later to answer to as many questions as I can if necessary!
You can watch the live stream and chat at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el4x9kVeRiA
A list of educational resources, Photoshop tutorials, and color theory stuff
After posting about Xia's YouTube channel, I thought it would be a good idea to provide some other useful resources for people interested in coloring or painting in general. Of course, I'm partial to my coloring course, but there's so many great resources out there. So here's a few that I've enjoyed over the years (and in most cases, still enjoy!)--things that have helped me on my journey or things I believe would help you.
In no particular order...
Lummage's YouTube Channel - Nathan Lumm is a fellow colorist with a ton of great videos. He'll provide a slightly different angle on coloring techniques than you'll see in my channel, since there's about a million ways to do everything in Photoshop! His Comic Book Coloring Tips & Tricks series is a great resource. He hasn't posted in a while, but he's probably busy coloring! :)
Sycra's Foundations of Light and Shadow - I love this series! It's a fantastic set of lessons for those of you that might have trouble with rendering. If you need help figuring out where the light and shadow should go, this is for you! I still go back and watch some of these videos every few months. This won't be the only appearance of Sycra on this list.
Also from Sycra... How To Choose Colors That Work This video was very eye openings for me, and I can't recommend it enough for those of you that might wonder why your colors "don't seem to fit" or clash or that sort of thing. Check it out!
For those of you that still remember what books are, James Gurney's book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter is incredibly good. Even though the book is focused on painting, all of the color theory stuff applies regardless. I keep this book very close to my desk all the time!
His gamut masking tool was recreated as a PSD file here, by the way: (You may don't know what that is yet, so read the book!)
There are also some resources in that link that explain more. I used this tool when generating palette ideas for a new Image project coming later this year. It's a great way to come up with interesting palettes.
This is a book you'll probably have to soak up for a while. There's a ton of content, and I still don't understand the majority of it well enough, but I'm working at it!
Comics Experience's Introduction to Comic Book Coloring. Coloring veteran Chris Sotomayor (AVENGERS, BATMAN, X-MEN, about a billion other books) teaches this course. Soto's been coloring since 1996. This is a paid option, and it's not cheap, but the difference here is that each class is live with the instructor online. I took this course is 2014--even after I was getting pro work, and I found it to be extremely helpful. Soto is pretty active on Twitter too, and he's good about answering questions about his course there.
This YouTube video is another excellent lesson in storytelling with color:
I recently discovered ArtStation. It's primarily digital painters and concept artists, but lots of great time-lapse process videos. This link sorts the trending posts that are 2D with video. Tons of good artists on there.
One more for you! Hi-Fi Color for Comics.
The original version was one of the first books I picked up on coloring, and I found out that figuring things out on my own had me doing some weird stuff before I read this.
They recently updated it, so be sure to check it out. It's a great book for beginners.
So that's it! I hope you enjoyed this list. Let me know what you guys think! I'm sure I'll add to this to keep it updated in the future. Send me your ideas as well!
