#liontutorials

[the-mother-of-lions]

for anonymous

Program: Photoshop 2020 Required Knowledge: How to make a gif, general familiarity with PS

tbh anon i think this tutorial will be a little disappointing! i don't really do anything special to my gifs. I'm not sure if you're wanting just a general coloring or something more in depth, so I'll do a little mix of everything.

This got super long i'm sorry

Basic Coloring

Relighting the Gif: As you may have noticed, a lot of tv nowadays is dark asf, and even if it isn't too dark, the lighting is just off. So I usually fix this with a Curves Layer. It offers me the most noticeable lighting change than any other method I've tried thus far. So after sharpening and cropping to suit your tastes, add a Curves adjustment layer. Clicking on the White Eyedropper, I then pick a spot on the gif that is the brightest. Sometimes I have to zoom in reallllly close to find a singular pixel thats lighter than all the others. And sometimes the lightest spot is too white and doesn't change anything, and if thats the case then I'll click around a little to see if any other spots offer a change in lighting that I like. I'll repeat this step with the Black Eyedropper but for the darker parts of the gif.

Hue/Saturation: This changes depending on what I'm giffing. For Live Action, I never do more than 10 on the Saturation line. For Anime, I usually do 20 but sometimes I'll do less depending on how the 20 looked. For Live Action with POC, I will do 10 and then open another H/S layer and adjust the red/yellow parts on the H/S.

Vibrance: I start with a Vibrance layer of 30. If I had to take out a lot of red/yellow, I usually duplicate this layer at least once.

Levels: Once I get the main adjustments out of the way, I go back to the Curves layer and add a Levels layer directly above it. On the Levels layer, I use the drop down to go through each color (Red, Green, Blue) and adjust the levels of those colors individually. I personally prefer cool toned gifs, so I usually add quite a bit of blue and red and take out green, but adjust as necessary.

Selective Color: Optional I don't always do this, it depends on the scene and how it already looks after the other four layers. But I do like a strong contrast so I will often Add a Selective Color layer above the Levels layer, choose Black from the drop down, and on the Black slider I increase it to 100. But sometimes thats wayyy too much and I'll do less as needed.

Black and White

For B&W recoloring, I'll do a Curves layer like above and then a H/S layer. On the H/S I'll lower the saturation completely.

Simple Recoloring

Simple as in I'm adjusting a few colors to bring them out more.

To start with and to get a basic grasp of what colors are in your gif, I'll open a Hue/Sat layer and crank the Saturation allll the way up. This will show you the main colors that make up your gif and which ones you need to change to reach your desired outcome.

After muting or deleting the H/S layer, I'll do small adjustments inside a new H/S layer focusing on the colors I want to change, then I'll add a Color Balance layer. Usually I only adjust the midtones and highlights, but it all depends on where the colors are that you're changing. Again, I like cool tone gifs so I'll take out a lot of yellow/green.

From here you can go to Selective Color and adjust the colors up or down as you need.

It's also helpful to add a Gradient Map. With Gradient maps one end should be white or black and the other end the color you want to bring out. Set the gradient maps blend to Overlay and lower the opacity to about 10-25%. Put this layer underneath your recolor layers.

Adding Gradients

On some gifs, it's helpful to add a Gradient layer to achieve a certain look.

Clicking on the Gradient layer, set your gradient and then change the blending layer to Color or Hue. Both of these will give different effects, but it's also a good idea to play with other blending modes to find what you like. From there, I usually lower the Opacity to 30-50%, duplicate the layer and change it to Screen and lower the Opacity on that to 30.

Honestly I don't do a ton of drastic recolors and I always feel kind of insecure about it? I'm very unconfident in my drastic recoloring skills. But if you have any further questions please feel free to ask!

Even if I don't know the answer, I'm sure I know someone who does.

Hope this was helpful in some way anon!

[the-mother-of-lions]

Referencing this gifset.

So tbh I was inspired by a different gifset which is linked in my original post. I made my own templates and everything, I didn't steal or get them from someone else.

I also did not expect to get asked about this so I didn't save my psds which is why it took me so long to answer this. sorry for not including visual examples, i just didn't want to remake the gifs. if anything confuses you please send me an ask or dm me!

To start with, I made my gifs and then the template which is a 5x5 grid of squares. I made it by making a bunch of lines and then adjusting them until they were all equi-distant apart. there is probably a better and easier way to do that, i just don't know it

The base layer is Big Megumi. On top of him is the smaller unhinged Megumi and the blend on him is set to Screen. And then Gojo is on top of them all, blend set to normal.

Duplicating the grid into the folder, I used the Rectangle Tool to draw three rectangles where I wanted Gojo to show through in the middle. These rectangles were all different layers originally, then I selected them all and Merged them into one shape.

Setting the shape below Gojo's layer, I then right-clicked on Gojo and chose Create Clipping Mask, which clips Gojo to the shape. I adjusted him from there until I got him set the way I wanted in the box.

The grid goes on top of everything then I did the recoloring.

Gojo is H/S with the Sat all the way down, and there's a layer mask on him where i erased the H/S from his eyeball and then increased the Cyan with Selective Color layers.

For the Megumi's, I used H/S and Selective Color to increase the blues until I got it the way I wanted. And that's honestly pretty much it.

The middle gif is simple blending which I actually already have a tutorial on here, and the coloring method is the same as Gojo.

I didn't really add any screenshots to this tutorial, I'm sorry, but I will give you my grids. I have a 5x5 and a 6x6. There's no need to credit me for them, I hope they help you in some way!

If you have any more questions, please reach out!

[the-mother-of-lions]

Anti-Whitewashing Tutorial ft OFMD

For anonymous, my beloved

When making edits of characters of color, its imperative that the original skin tones be left as they are. In characters with brown skin tones, it can be all too easy to unintentionally lighten the skin and whitewash them or over saturate the skin and make it look orange or red.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to keep the original skin tone. This is not a tutorial on how to make a gif, but I will link mine at the bottom. This tutorial primarily focuses on Taika Waititi and his skin, but I do have a tutorial that focuses on black skin with the BBC Merlin fandom that will also be linked at the bottom. However, the process is pretty much the same.

This tutorial will work for Photoshop and Photopea.

Step 1: Make your gif. Crop it, sharpen it, etc. This is my gif, which has only been sharpened.

Step 2: Basic recolor Here I’ve added Curves, Selective Color, Hue/Sat, and Vibrance. When setting your Curves layer, keep an eye on the character of color. Make sure you’re not overlightening the gif and washing the character out completely. It can be helpful to do your Curves layer last or edit it after you finish. In this one compared to the first, you can see how red and oversaturated he is and that’s not at all what we want. He can look better.

Step 3: Reduce redness To reduce the redness of his skin, we’re going to add another Hue/Saturation Layer. Set the Range to Red. Set the Saturation Bar to -30 and the Lightness to -5. This isn’t the hard and true way of reducing redness. There are other methods, but this is the one that I think looks best. Alternatively, you can play around with the amounts and duplicate as needed.

Step 4: Bring back warmth He no longer looks abrasively red, but he does look washed out and crusty. To fix this, we’re going to add a Vibrance Layer at 30. I oftentimes duplicate this layer once to make the colors richer, but use your best judgement.

This is what your gif should look like. Taika looks normal again, he doesn’t look washed out or red. From here you could add in whatever extra stuff you’d like to or post it as is.

Here’s another side by side of the original (left) and the edited version (right).

More tutorials: How To Make A Gif Anti-Whitewashing ft Elyan (BBC Merlin) Overlays

[the-mother-of-lions]

Photopea Tutorial

Shoutout to the other Broke Giffers on the Merlin Fic Server! This is a tutorial on how to do overlay gifs specifically for Photopea. It might work for Photoshop, I have no idea.

This tutorial is made on the assumption that you already know how to make a gif and have a rough grasp of how to use Photopea.

So first and foremost, we’re going to choose our gifs. You want to make sure the gifs you choose have different colors. As in, one is dark and the other is light. You can make it work with two gifs of the same coloring and manually recolor one of them, but it’s going to be extra work and more mb’s on your gif. It really just depends on how much work you want to put in and the vibe you’re going for.

Then, you need to actually make the gifs. The gifs need to have the same amount of frames or it might not work quite the way you want. You can use two gifs with different amounts of frames, but there’s always the chance it may not align quite the way you want. The gifs I’m using for this tutorial have 22 frames each.

After making them and opening them in Photopea, I’m going to select all the layers and sharpen them. Then, with all the layers still selected, I’m going to go to Image > Adjustments and adjust my gif as normal using Curves, Selective Color, Hue/Saturation, and Vibrance.

The most important thing to remember when blending gifs together in Photopea is that Photopea will only merge frames. If you have any adjustment layers in, even if they’re invisible, it will not work. This is why you do it through Image Adjustments. If you don’t want to do this for whatever reason, you can add in your adjustments after you combine the gifs.

Next comes putting both gifs into the same project.

On Gif One, you’re going to right click on the name of the gif in the frame/layers list. Choose Duplicate into... In the dialogue box that pops up, click the drop down arrow and choose New Project. 

Go back to Gif Two and do the same thing, only this time you’re going to duplicate the gif into same project as Gif One. Now both gifs are together.

Scroll to the bottom and delete the Background Layer. 

This works better if you place the darker gif, in this case Elyan, on the bottom. So just drag and drop the gif folder underneath the other. It should look like this: 

Highlight the top gif and click on the Blending toolbar. Select Lighten. You can also adjust the Opacity if you would like, but I haven’t done that in this example. Then, after ensuring that all of the layers of the gif you want to move are selected, move the gif to your desired spot using the Move tool. Your gif should now look like this:

There are plenty of giffers who would leave this as is, and there’s no problem with that! However, for my personal preference, I’m going to clean things up.

To clean up the overlays, I’m going to select the top gif and add a Rastor Mask. Next, I’m going to select the Brush tool and use the Mechanical Pencil, size 24. Make sure you’ve changed the brush color to black, then I’m going to color on the gif itself to erase the extra bits from the bottom gif.

Then, I’ll do the exact same with the bottom gif and erase the junk from Gif One. It should look like this (click to enlarge):

Lastly, we’re going to merge the two folders together. At the top of the screen, select Layer and look to the bottom to find Animation > Merge. The gifs should now be in a single folder together. Congratulations! You’ve now made an overlay gif.

This is perfectly fine to post, but you can always add more. For this gif, I’m going to add a little more color and some text. 

I also slowed the gif down to about 60% of its original speed and added my watermark. This gif is part of a set I’m working on and just haven’t quite been ready to post it. 

If you have any questions, you’re welcome to reach out and ask!

You can see my Anti-White Washing Tutorial here

[the-mother-of-lions]

Gif Tutorial - Photopea

For Anonymous

To make gifs I use free programs such VLC Media Player, EZgif, and Photopea. You can find all of these through a simple google search. 

This tutorial was created on the basis that you know nothing about giffing. This is a simple tutorial and is only meant to carry you through the basic process of making a gif and then retouching it to look “normal”. There is no extra coloring or text in this tutorial.

The first step in making a gif using these programs is getting a clip.

Open your video download in VLC, and using this tutorial you can record a short part of the episode. Now open EZgif. Upload the clip you just took and following the website’s instruction, trim the clip to just the few seconds that you want.

I suggest never making a gif that’s longer than about 25 frames (2.5 seconds), but tumblr has a 10mb upload limit so that’s totally up to you.

Once you’ve saved your gif, we’re going to switch over to Photopea.

File > Open your gif in Photopea. Take a deep breath and try not to feel overwhelmed. This is my gif, completely free of any adjustments:

First things first, we’re going to sharpen your gif. Make sure all of the frames of your gif are selected. Then you’re going to go to the top of the screen and find Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen. A box with slider bars will open. You are going to change the values to:

Amount: 200% Radius: 0.2

If your gif is from S1-S3, I suggest changing your Radius to 0.3 to keep it from getting too pixelated.

Next, we’re going to add our first Adjustment Layer. Open Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Curves and another box with a graph will open. You can either manually enter the values or drag the bar in the middle. This layer is incredibly subjective to the gif you’re making, but this is what it looks like on my example:

You can tell that it’s brighter and clearer than the gif we started with. 

Next we’re going to add a Selective Color Layer. I use this layer on every single gif I make, no expections. Open Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Selective Color. At the top of the box, change the Color to White, then on the sliding bar labeled Black, change the value to 100. Go back to the top of the box, change the color to Neutral. Change the sliding bar on Black to 6. Again go to the top, switch to the color Black, and change the sliding bar on Black to 6. 

Since this is an Elyan gif, I’m going to adjust the gif to bring his skin tone back to normal. Honestly, I do this on gifs of white characters as well as they tend to get a little pink and I personally don’t like that. So to fix Elyan’s skin, I’m going to open Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation. I’m going to select the arrow beside the Range name to make sure it gets to all the layers, then I’m going to change the Range to Red, change Saturation to -30, and Light to -5.

As you can see, he’s less red albeit a little ashy. To fix that, and I do this on all gifs regardless of whether or not I do the Hue/Saturation adjustment, I’m going to open Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation again and change the Range back to Master. For the Saturation value, I’m going to change that to 10. 

It’s better, but not great, so I’m going to open Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Vibrance and change the Vibrance value to 30. Repeat this step as needed. For this particular gif, I did it twice. Then go to File > Export as > Gif. You can also export as a PSD, which will just save your work as is but it’s not a moving image.

I prefer to slow my gifs down, so on the Export screen I’m going to change the speed to 60% and save.

As you can tell, this is drastically different from what we started with. I also added in my watermark, which I suggest doing as there are always people out stealing gifs and taking credit for work that isn’t their own.

Here’s a side by side (the original is on the left, the adjusted one on the right):

If you have any other questions, you’re welcome to reach out!

[the-mother-of-lions]

Whitewashing, Gifs, and Elyan

As we get closer to the start of Elyan Appreciation Fest, I wanted to take a moment to go over how to avoid whitewashing the characters of color that make up the Merlin fandom, but more specifically, Elyan.

The BBC didn’t do Elyan any favors by giving him a majority of dark colored or poorly lit scenes. However, that’s not an excuse to washout, lighten, or oversaturate Elyan’s skin when giffing his scenes.

Black and brown skin is significantly warmer in tone than light skin and the way you bring that out is by enhancing the reds and yellows. However, in an attempt to bring Elyan’s true skin tone out, some editors may unintentionally oversaturate by bringing out too much red and yellow without balancing with blue which then makes Elyan look orange.

A lot of BBC Merlin scenes are also very dark or blue colored for “night time” scenes and in trying to lighten them, especially when next to light skinned actors, Elyan’s skin may unintentionally come out looking ashy or lightened.

This feeds into part of the reason I think he is so under-giffed. The fear of unintentionally whitewashing or oversaturating can be very overwhelming. With this tutorial I want to help create a more secure and informed environment for giffing Elyan.

I am absolutely not an authority on giffing. This is just the process that I use and should not be considered the be all-end all for giffing Elyan. Additionally, this process might not work for all scenes and is subjective to the original coloring of the scene.

This coloring tutorial is created on the basis that anyone using it already knows how to create a base gif. I use Photopea for editing (ya girl broke), but this should work with Photoshop as well.

Again, this is my process for giffing and some of you may already have a process that works for you, this is just to help ensure that Elyan and other characters of color do not get unintentionally washed out or lightened when giffed. 

This is the original: 

To start with, I sharpen the gif and do some basic coloring using Curves, Hue/Saturation, and Selective Color. 

My gif comes out looking like this:

It’s brighter and more vibrant than the original and I know a lot of people would probably be fine with how this looks and move on. However, Elyan does look a bit more red than he should and I know that we can do better.

To correct this, I’m going to add a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer and isolate the reds. I’m going to bring the Saturation down to -30 and the Lightness down to -5.

And I’m also going to add a Vibrance layer at 30.

Instead of adding more color, the Vibrance layer is simply going to enhance the existing colors within the gif and make them pop more.

The vibrance amount is also very subjective. If this scene were lighter, like a daytime scene, I start with 10. My personal rule of thumb is to start with 30 and subtract or add additional vibrancy layers in small amounts.

Adjustments such as Vibrancy, Color Balance, Selective Coloring, and Hue/Saturation can drastically affect the overall gif and it’s better to go slowly and make small adjustments than to rush and make a mistake.

The gif now looks like this:

Instead of looking reddish, Elyan’s skin is now more true to tone. I prefer slowed gifs, so I’m going to reduce the speed to 70%. From here, you could add other coloring layers, text, or whatever fits your preference and post it!

The important thing to remember when coloring gifs is that it just takes practice. My first gifs were not great and even now I’m definitely not the best. I’m still learning and finding better ways of doing things.

Again, this is just my way of doing things and there isn’t one correct way of giffing and coloring. Sometimes the coloring just doesn’t work! So many of BBC Merlin’s scenes are poorly lit or have that fake night coloring on them that makes the scene come out very blue and can be difficult to fix, much less make Elyan true to tone when there’s so much blue involved. 

At the end of the day, making an effort to keep Elyan and others as close to tone as possible is always best and you, the editor, should use your best judgement. 

Final gif compared to the original.

I’m always happy to talk about Elyan or Tomiwa in general, so if you have questions you’re welcome to ask!