I got a lot of comments about that fake scene Steddie gifset and figured I might as well make a tutorial of it. Or at least a behind-the-scenes explanation of what I did because a tutorial requires an actual technical understanding of everything whereas half of my coloring process is usually throwing layers at the picture to see what sticks. Still maybe it will be helpful to gif makers trying to bring together differently colored source material to make it look like it's the same scene. It's doable. Anyways here we go.
So this is the uncolored base. Blue and orange are literally opposites of the color wheel. We're off to a fantastic hair-pulling start. There's no way this can work, right? Maybe just make it all black&white. Nah, too easy, we're here to SUFFER and ENJOY IT.
Step one. I've already preached about Divide before. It's amazing. Use it. Find the shade that is your worst offender you need to get rid of, just by using eyedropper somewhere on the lighter parts of the image. Fill a blank layer, set to Divide. Fiddle with hue/saturation/brightness of it until you get something that doesn't overdarken or overbrighten the image, just removes that intense color filter.
Step two. Standard Exposure & Levels correction. +0.36 exposure used on Eddie bc he's darker, none on Steve, the Levels are like this.
Step three. Fun with Curves begins. You can technically do everything in a single Curves layer but I like to use one just to brighten things up and leave it so I don't mess it up and create a second one for more radical color changes.
Second Curves layer. The goal is for the image colors to meet somewhere in the middle. So Eddie needs less blues and more reds, Steve the other way around, more blues, less reds and greens.
Have both images open side by side on your screen and work in small increments of change on them in turn so you can save the result often.
Proper techniques to using Curves actually exist. I've read the tutorials and proceeded to never use them, I just poke and prod at the graph until "ooooh this looks nice". Sorry if this is unhelpful but it's kinda more like art in fine-tuning the colors.
There we go. Already better. The colors look mostly normal, it's a neutral base now, time to just make them match.
I still didn't like the blues/cyans being so bright on Eddie's background so I just desaturated both by about the same amount.
Channel Mixer for Steve. I very vaguely understand how it works, don't even ask, but I needed to bring a bit more red to Steve's face bc it still looked green-ish and this is how I usually solve that problem. (Why am I even making a tutorial? I am not qualified for this, I'm just vibing 80% of the time.)
Selective Color is useful in all kinds of ways but one thing I always use for giffing is adding like 2-3% more black to blacks. It just makes those darkest tones pop without darkening anything else and the end result is more crisp.
Biggest issue with Steve was the too light background, so I had to paint some darkness around him. Low brush hardness so it blends nicely, it's fine if it overlaps with the character, if there isn't too much movement at low opacity it won't be noticeable, but if he was moving around it would be much more difficult (I'd have to adjust the position of it frame by frame).
Eddie still needed a slight shift from blue to green hues and slapping on a beige Soft Light layer at very low opacity was the quickest solution.
Last step! Color Burn. If it wasn't obvious already I love my single-color fill layers and blending modes. Highly recommend playing with them and seeing what they all do because they slap.
Very light shades, mostly on Steve (blue) to really darken those shadows further and make it look like the Upside Down, and then just a tiny bit of green on Eddie bc it made the background tones match better.
Aaaand that's a wrap. Usual sharpening etc. on top (I always have all the layers in a smart object so that's super quick) and we're done.
I don't really do coloring tutorials bc I'm basically poking everything with a trial&error method myself, but I thought this might be useful in case anyone isn't using this and I discovered this accidentally and it's my favorite thing now.
Night shots are honestly the biggest pain in a gifmaker's ass. And a really neat and quick way to brighten them up, get rid of the blue hues and bring back what resembles normal daylight colors is a blue fill layer set to Divide. You're gonna have to fiddle with the specific blue shade as well as possibly the opacity settings, but with the right color the instant effect is goddamn amazing.
This here is literally just the original screenshot and one layer of color #2f5e82, 100% opacity, set to Divide.
This already makes it so much easier to work with further coloring (like I'll probably clean up the greenish hues bc I'm not a fan of them), but even slapping a quick Levels on top already makes it look pretty damn decent.
Thought this might come in handy to fellow artists.
By default Windows can't do thumbnail previews of PSD files, which is annoying and can make finding the necessary PSD troublesome. This quick shell extension solves the issue. Works with Win11.
