#gif colouring tutorial

[boromirswife]

How I Make Gifs ~ For Anon ❤️

An anon asked me if I would ever consider doing a tutorial for how I make gifs! It's very flattering that you like my gifs enough to want to know exactly how I make them, so here is a little tutorial using my favourite character from my favourite movie ❤️

I might also make a separate tutorial for giffing dark scenes later 😌

Here's a download of my gif in PSD form if you'd like to get a better look at the settings I used.

Programs used: PotPlayer, Photoshop.

First, you need to get your screencaps. I would suggest using a high quality recording of whatever movie/TV show/video you want to make gifs of. My recording of Fellowship is in 1080p, and the quality looks incredible!

I use PotPlayer to get my screencaps. To do this, open the video file in the program and find the moment you want to gif. It's probably best to go back to just before that particular moment, and then press Ctrl + G. This will bring up the consecutive image capturer window. Below are the settings I use to get my screencaps:

Then, press start and wait for your moment to be captured! Once you've got everything you need, press stop and navigate to the folder that you indicated under storage. Here you will find all of your screencaps! You probably ended up with way more than you need (I know I certainly did 😅). Now, delete all of the screencaps that you don't want in your gif.

For the actual gif making, I use a cracked version of Photoshop. I don't exactly remember where I found it unfortunately, but I'm sure that there's people out there who might have some links handy if you look around! Once you've got PS open, navigate to File > Scripts > Load Files Into Stack... and click on it! That will open the Load Layers window.

Now, change Use to Folder. Then, click browse and navigate to the folder that contains your screencaps. Click select folder, and after a few moments of loading your window should look more like this.

Then, press OK, and wait for your layers to load. Depending on how many caps you have, it could take longer. Once it's finished loading, you need to decide on your gif dimensions! For this, I decided on 268px x 225px. Once you've chosen your size, use the crop tool to get your gif to that size. Now, you should have a smaller image, like this:

The next step I do is to use this Photoshop action by @maziekeen. They have a little tutorial on how to use this action there, so I'll just say that once you've loaded it into your program, use part 1 / load into stack. Press the play button, and then the OK button on the two windows that pop up. Now, your gif will be nice and sharpened, and you'll be able to see it move for the first time! Here's what mine currently looks like, without any other edits:

Now, it's time to start on colouring. Every gif (or scene, sometimes you can reuse the same colouring if you're giffing an entire scene) is different, so it will have different needs. However, I tend to always use the same layers in the same order for all of my gifs — it's just the settings that change. I think the colouring of this particular scene is lovely, so I don't want to change it drastically, I just want to enhance it.

First, I create a Curves layer. At this point, I also like to make a group to hold all of my adjustment layers. This makes it easier for you to switch your adjustment layers on and off if you want to compare with the original colouring!

Going back to your curves layer, pick the little white eyedropper tool in the Properties tab. You want to find and click on the whitest area in the gif and make it a bit brighter! I picked the white in one of Boromir's eyes.

This is what my gif looks like now with the Curves layer:

Next, I use Levels. It's a very subtle change, but you can notice a slight darkening of the blacks in the image. Here's my settings for this layer:

And here's the gif with this step applied. Like I said, it's a very subtle change:

Up next is Brightness & Contrast. This layer is just a case of messing around with the settings until it looks right for you. You don't want to make it look too bright or too contrasted, though, because it will make the colouring look weird.

A bit more of a change this time! We're getting there:

Next, I like to do Colour Balance. Sometimes I wait and do the Selective Colour layer first (it'll still be above Colour Balance though), but with this gif, I decided to do it first. I want Boromir in the foreground to contrast more with the watery background, so I upped the Red in the Midtones. I think Midtones is the most important part of Colour Balance, so the Highlights and Shadows are more minor adjustments here.

Here's the gif with the Colour Balance layer!

Now, we have Selective Colour. Like I said before, I sometimes like to do this layer and then go back to the Colour Balance to make minor adjustments. For this gif I mainly focused on slightly reducing the cyan in the reds and yellows to add a little more colour to Boromir's tunic and hair.

I'm a big fan of bright, vibrant gifs, so I like to use the Vibrance layer copiously.

I upped the vibrance to max, but it's left Boromir's face looking a bit too red and his neck is a little pink, so I went back and did some minor adjustments to the Colour Balance and Selective Colour layers to fix that. Then, voila!

Now that we're done with colouring, go back to the beginning of the timeline at the bottom the screen. Then, go back to Actions and scroll down to the bottom, and look for the action called part 2 / finishing. Just like with the first action, press the Play button and it will work its magic!

Press Ctrl + Shift + Alt + C, and try playing your gif from there. Sometimes, the gif will be too fast and you'll need to slow it down, and you can't always tell until you play it in the 'Save for Web' window. I ended up slowing mine down from 0.05 to 0.07.

Once your gif is looking just right, press Ctrl + Shift + Alt + C again. These are the settings I use to save my gifs, and I think it makes them look really nice! Then click Save, and save your gif wherever you want.

Now, once you've saved your gif, you can post it to Tumblr (if that's what you're wanting to do) or simply keep it to yourself! But I'm sure that others would love to see your creations :D

***

A little extra info - this gif doesn't have text because there's no dialogue, but these are the settings I use for gifs with text (the text size depends on the dimensions of the gif):

Sometimes I use white text, sometimes I use yellow. And if there's more than one person talking I use both!

I hope that this tutorial was helpful, and if you have any more questions, feel free to ask!

[dingusfreakhxrrington]

Gif Colouring Tutorial - 01

Idk if this will be helpful for anyone but I’ve been playing around and making gifs recently, specifically with the colourings, and I wanted to share how I made this one.

Tutorial under the cut!

Step 1:

Add a curves layer to brighten your gif. Adjust it however you need to until you’re happy with it. This is how mine looked for this gif: (it was a really subtle change)

Step 2:

Add some colour balance if you want to and again, adjust it however you like until you’re happy with how it looks. For this gif I added a little more blue:

Step 3:

Try some colour lookup. You can use the defaults, make your own, or download some from the web (deviantart is a good place to look for some). For this gif I used a default lut called ‘fall colours’ because it really brought out the hues and vibrance:

Step 4:

Add a gradient map and set the blending mode to luminosity. For this gif I used one of the default gradients which added more vibrance to the gif and also gave it a bit more of a vintage kind of look which I wanted for this gif (a black and white gradient can also be a great option!):

Step 5:

Add a levels adjustment layer and play around with it until you’re happy with how it looks. For this gif I used it to bring some contrast and depth back that was lost with the addition of the gradient map:

And ta-da, you’re done!

[beverlycrushr]

Colour meme tutorial

I got a request to do a colouring tutorial on this gifset. And i know this was like 2 weeks ago but maybe it’ll help some of you guys too. 

So we’ll look at how to go from these to these:

Disclaimer: This tutorial is by no means a full step-by-step tutorial, and it requires some knowledge about how to make gifs. 

These gifs are for the zodiac colour meme, and this is the sagittarius palette, which is “white/silver and sage green” so basically this is the colour palette i’m using

STEP 1 - choosing gifs So first things first to make consistent colours in a gifset you need to have good gifs to begin with.

Whenever I choose scenes for a gifset I choose a scene where the colours

a) are really close to the colours i want to achieve in this case all I have to do is adjust the green shades to match my colour palette

b) have nothing to do with the target colour here I have to play around with the colours a bit more - first make them green and then adjust the shades. The important part to remember here is to choose colours that have nothing to do with skintone colours. e.g. if you have someone in a red dress and want to make that red dress green the person’s skin will change too and then you’ll have to mask stuff and that’s just too much work 0/5 would no recommend. 

STEP 2 - apply base colouring Use whatever base colouring you usually use - brighten the gifs if you need to and make the colours more vibrant - it will be easier to adjust the colours later on

STEP 3 - get rid of the colours you don’t need

For this you can choose either Hue/Saturation or Selective Color (Color Balance if you feel adventurous - but it’s not the best one to use for changing specific colours)

All i did was set the saturation of colours i don’t need to -80 -100 (something like that), like reds, yellows etc

STEP 4a - enhance the colours you need (for A cat. gifs)

My main colour is green so on top of my base colouring I also enhanced the green in the gifs: 

so we are now here:

STEP 4b - change to colours that do not match (for B cat. gifs)

again I used the hue/saturation panel and then adjusted the colours I wanted to change to green, in this case the blues and the magentas like so

and here is the result:

STEP 5 - adjut the colours 

So now we have our base set up, both for the originally green and for the originally different coloured gifs. At this point your gifs should look quite identical colourwise. 

Now comes the fun part - the part I can explain but there is no specific steps to follow. The goal is to match the colours to my green which is on the palette.

All I do is I make a layer on top of the gif i’m working on as a guide like so: 

At this point these gifs only need some saturation changes, bacause they are way too vibrant. If you can’t match the target colour with one adjustment layer that’s totally fine - sometimes I use 2 or more to make the colours uniform. 

For example the originally purple gif needed two additional hue/saturation layer (on top of the purple - green shift) to reach the desired colour. It’s just playing around with the greens’ saturation and lightness levels:  

But at some point you’ll reach the desired colours and after that you can do extra stuff like brighten the gifs more or make the blacks less dark. Since this colour pattern is quite light I played around with levels at the very end. 

SOOOO, to sum it up:

Choose good base gifs

Enhance the colours you need 

Get rid of the colours you don’t need

Adjust the shit out of your main colours until you reach the target colour

(Optional) Look out of your window... it’s probably night because you’ve successfully spent like 6 hours on a gifset - but at least it’s pretty

If you have any questions or comments my inbox is always open :)

[oikawastooru]

gif tutorial: dark colourings

I was asked by a lovely anon to do a tutorial on how i colour my dark gifsets! I am by no means an expert AT ALL as I still have lots of room for improvement, but i hope this will still be of use to people. I’ve already pre-surface blurred and pre-sharpened these gifs and I’m basing this tutorial off the psd I used in this gifset. 

This is not a gif tutorial, just a colouring tutorial

Knowledge of PS and gif making is needed as I will not be going over the basics

Links will be in a [ ]

I will not be releasing the psd i used, but you can follow the tutorial to create the same one (might be released in a psd pack in the future)

Please like/reblog if you find this useful c: I would really appreciate it!

Without psd:

With psd

Let’s get started!

1. Start with your original gif

2. I always start with a layer or two of selective colouring to get the colours i want. I coloured reds and yellows first. 

[these are my settings]

3. Then I add another selective colour layer to colour blues and cyans (honestly, idk why because i just desaturate it all later lol)

[these are my settings]

4. Then I desaturate everything

[these are my settings]

5. Next, I apply [this gradient map] <it’s one that comes with photoshop

I set it to soft light; 100% opacity

6. Next, I add a levels layer to make it a bit darker

[these are my settings]

7. I then duplicate my gradient map layer (same one as above), and set it to 35% opacity 

8. Lastly, I play around with curves a bit and it’s done!

[these are my settings]

That’s it! I usually dont like to use a crap ton of layers for colourings, as I find it lowers the quality of my gifs so I usually like to get things done in 10 layers or less (there are 7 here). A few more things to note:

In general, for dark colourings, gradients are my best friend 

I like to isolate 1 or 2 colours because I find that way it looks nicer. 

I havent tried this colouring on any other anime other than snk, but I think it works well with the majority of scenes in snk

Thank you for reading, and I hope this tutorial is helpful for you! Please message me if you have any more questions~

[tinytveit]

Gif Coloring Tutorial

end result:

So, this is actually pretty easy. All it is really is a blending mode - but the other parts actually make it look good. So, onwards!

o1. Make and resize/sharpen your gif. I use this action, just follow the instructions on the post there for how to use.

I start with this:

o2. First, i added a curves layer, set to auto, and then a brightness/contrast layer.

and ended up with this:

  o3. Then i started on the selective color, the settings are as follow.

You'll probably need to tweak those and your blue settings slightly, but you can start to see progress.

o4. Then i want you to add a black and white gradient set at luminosity fill and opacity at 100% and another brightness/contrast, set to:

After all of that, this is what my gif looks like:

Pretty, huh? 

o5.Ok, now im guessing you'd expect me to go 'now's the tricky part' but no, its pretty simple. Add a fill layer, color #f26c4f it should be a coral-y color, now set it to saturation with the fill at 20%.

-

Please like/reblog if this helped you! I'm pretty much in love with this gif, ee. Gifset here. Have fun, friends!

[lilopelekai]

Pastel colouring for gifs

Thank you! Below the cut I'll show you how to make this:

What you'll need:

Photoshop (any version should work but cs5+ is best for this)

Basic giffing skills (I'm not showing you how to gif in this tutorial, just how to colour)

PATIENCE

First load your gif and sharpen it. Mine started like this

First we're going to start with a curves layer. I like to do it kind of in a loose "S" shape. It adds a load of brightness and a bit of contrast.

It's already starting to look nicer but it needs a bit more brightness (and maybe a bit of contrast) so add a brightness/contrast layer.

My settings:

Current gif:

Next is probably one of the most important - Selective Colour.

This is also probably the hardest of all the steps because each gif needs a bit of tweaking depending on the colours in it.

My settings for this gif: (I didn't use any of the other colours)

All I can say for this step is EXPERIMENT!!!! These settings won't look perfect on everything. This is what they look like on the Belle gif:

But this is what it looks like on the ballroom gif: (which in my opinion looks okay, but not really "pastel" because Beast's jacket is way to bright)

You'll have to change settings and dive into the other colour settings depending on the colours in your gif.

ANYWAYS next we're going to add a vibrance layer just to bump up the colour a smidge. (Which is why photoshops cs5 and above work best, anything below that doesn't offer vibrance.) i'm not going to even show the gif because it barely changes it enough to see, but it's a little bit. These were my settings:

Next we'll add another curves layer, which is also open to experimentation. I stuck with a loose S for this one again, but other variations look really nice on pastel gifs.

Setting 1 (which I used in my gifset):

Setting 2 (which I didn't use, but gives a nice pastel look):

And the last step which is kind of optional is a colour fill layer. For this gifset I did a pale orange (#eacdac) set to soft light with 70% opacity.

Final gif:

Like I said, don't hesitate to try different things and have patience. These things are not always easy. :))))

If you have any questions feel free to ask me I'll try to help!!!

[padfout]

Gif Colouring Tutorial by Mockiengjay

How to go from this:

to this:

In this tutorial, I'm gonna be explaining how I colour my gifs. If you don't know how to make a gif, check out this tutorial.

First of all, make your gif, sharpen it and crop it. Now let's start colouring it!

Step 1.

Use a curves layer with two points. The one on the left will be down and the one on the right will be up so that they will form an "S". Here are my settings:

my gif:

Step 2.

Add a vibrance layer. This will give more colour to the gif. But be careful not to overdo it or your gif will not look good. Here are my settings:

and my gif:

If your gif is too yellow/red/blue, do not add vibrance.

Step 3.

Colour Balance layer. This helps a lot if you use it correctly. If you want your gif to be warm, drag the arrows to red,purple and yellow. If you want the colours to be cold, drag them to blue,cyan and green. My settings:

my gif:

Step 4.

Selective colouuuuur. My favourite part of colouring. Here, you just have to play around to find the settings that fit your gif better but mine are these:

and my gif:

Step 5.

Levels Layer. Which can bright up your image or darken it depending on your settings. Here are mine:

my gif:

Step 6.

Add a Black and White gradient map and put it on soft light. Play around with the opacity. I ended up with this:

and my gif looks like this:

Step 7.

Select all your layers and then right click > duplicate layers. Select the duplicated layers on top of your old ones and right click > convert to smart object.  Then go to Filter > Artistic > Film Grain. Play around till you found the right settings. Here are mine:

Then click okay. Put the layer on soft light and play with the opacity. I put it on 25%. Here is my gif:

Now the next steps are optional but if you want, you can follow them. 

Step 8.

I wanted to make the background a little bit whiter so I added a new layer directly above the gif layer and painted on the parts i wanted to be white with a soft brush. I put the layer to Linear Dodge (Add) and played around with the opacity ending up with 41%.

Step 9.

I added two layers on top of everything, put them on screen and started painting with colours to add some lighting. I also lowered their opacity. I realised that I wanted the right side to look a bit darker so i deleted a part of the white layer i had added earlier.  And that's pretty much all I did. This is my final product:

If you have any questions, ask me here. Sorry if this was rushed or anything haha. Hope I helped a little bit. xx