Hi I just wanted to say I love your coloring process for roman holiday! The results turns out great. I was wondering if you would consider doing a tutorial for Old Hollywood colored scenes as well? Thanks so much in advance.
hi!! i'm so glad it was helpful (also i need to rewatch roman holiday tbh) and worked well for you! i'd be happy to do a coloring tutorial with the disclaimer that 1) i haven't giffed much Old Hollywood and 2) i color from scratch for every movie/show when i gif it for the first time -- which means that what works for one movie (or even different scenes in the same movie!) may not work for another!
with that being said, i'll walk you through how i color singin' in the rain since that's one of my faves from that era!
step 1: make your gif, crop, and sharpen! this tutorial assumes basic gifmaking knowledge (if you need help with that, check out the beginner tutorials tag on my resource blog @gifmakerresource) and my process entails loading my video clip, cropping the extra frames, cropping the dimensions (540px x 400px in this case), sharpening, and converting to video timeline. here's my gif prior to any coloring:
step 2: brightness/contrast. i quite literally always begin with an "empty" brightness/contrast layer with the blending mode set to screen. this means i don't change any of the values, but by changing the blending mode, it brightens the gif up considerably.
step 3: curves! as always, my next step is utilizing the curves eyedroppers. on the lefthand side, i've highlighted the black eyedropper. click that and then click on the blackest part of the gif. in this case, i selected the black detail/inset on the door in the very bottom left corner of the gif. then click the white eyedropper (the 3rd one down -- the middle eyedropper is for midtones) and select the whitest part of the gif. i selected a spot on the highlight of debbie's head covering. as you can see from the screenshot below, that added some blue and green to the gif. in this case, the black didn't change things much, which is okay!
curves are especially helpful when working with heavily tinted scenes as it can help counteract the overall tint. it's not really applicable with this particular scene, but keep that in mind! with this gif, curves make a very subtle change, but i love cool colors and tend to make most of my coloring lean on the bluer side as a matter of personal preference!
step 4: selective color - neutrals! if you've used any of my coloring tutorials before, you know how much i adore selective color. adjusting the neutrals is always my first step. for this gif, here are my settings for black and neutral:
for the blacks, i almost always darken those as i like how it heightens the contrast in my gifs. in the same vein, i almost always lighten the blacks under neutrals to brighten the gif a bit more. just know that you need to be very cautious when adjusting neutrals when giffing people of color as this can really affect their skintone and inadvertently whitewash. for tutorials on how to color POC, check this tag! as for adjusting the cyan and yellow values, this very subtly helps cancel out the red- and yellow-ness in the gif. plus, as i mentioned, i heart blue :)
here's what we have so far!
step 5: now, quite honestly, you could stop here and have a nice, bright gif! but it's still a bit yellow for me, so using channel mixer and selecting the blue dropdown, i'm going to increase the blue value to cancel out some of that yellow tint:
with channel mixer, a little goes a long way!
step 6: one of my go-tos is also adding a black-and-white gradient map layer with the blending mode set to soft light and lowering the opacity. it kind of... mutes? the gif a bit, so it doesn't work for every coloring, but when dropped down to 20% opacity, i like the effect it has here!
and this is my final product. i'm happy with how it turned out and while you could definitely keep fucking around with different adjustment layers, unless i was going for a specific kind of set, this is where i'd stop!
if you have any additional questions -- on this tutorial or anything else -- please let me know!
Hello again! Thank you so much for making the tutorial. It looks lovely. And I did learn a few new tips an tricks. I never really used channel mixer that much before. I´m excited to try it out. Have a nice day :)
you're very welcome!! i hate gatekeeping lol so im always happy to make tutorials! i do have a channel mixer tag on @gifmakerresource as well if you want to learn some more about it. it's another adjustment layer that can help a lot with super tinted scenes! have a good day 😊
