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.
