@joler07sg asked me how I made this gifset. So here's a quick tutorial about the colouring!
Before I start: to make my gifs I use Photoshop (CS5)!
1. For this colouring, I started with a Curves layer, to brighten the scenes up a bit. If a Brightness/Contrast layer is more comfortable for you, you could also use that.
Note that this layer might need a bit of adjustment on every separate gif.
2. Then I did a Vibrance layer, this raises the intensity of the colours. However, this layer is almost optional. There are some scenes in my original gif set where this layer doesn’t make a difference due to me using a Gradient Map later on.
3. After that, I adjusted the colours a bit with Selective Colour layers. In this gif set, it mainly achieves to give some areas of the gifs more contrast (the red layer, yellow layer and the black) but also to make the blues pop more (blue and cyan).
I like to use several Selective Colouring layers so that I have more control if I need to adjust specific colours/layers later on.
4. Now the most important layer in this colouring is the Gradient Map. When you set up a Gradient Map, you will notice that every colour on the left side of the Gradient will mainly show up on the dark parts of the scene, and the colour on the right will mainly show up on the light parts of the scene. So, since I wanted the orange for example on light areas, I set it to the right.
The Gradient Map layer is set to “Multiply”. I love this setting when I want colours to strongly show up on light areas of a scene.
The light/darkness ratio wasn’t the same on every scene of my gif set though; I adjusted the Gradient Map on every gif to make the colours look cohesive in the overall set. Here is an example for the Paul gif:
And Alia:
And thats all about the colouring itself! :)
I have one more important note though, my colouring here is very reliant on the light/contrast of the scenes! So, a very important aspect of this colouring is to use the right scenes. It will simply not look the same on scenes that don’t have a lot of bright parts in them.
Here is an example: Irulan is one of my favourite characters so I wanted to include her pretty cape scene, but her scene in the trailer is very dark, so I couldn’t include her :(. An opposite setting to Multiply is “Screen” but not even Screen could emulate the look, so I had to drop her gif.
