Ghost Friend coloring made by mischiefiles to celebrate the month of terror, I would appreciate your feedback or suggestion if you like the effect, it helps to maintain the quality. If you had any problems please contact me here.
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003. HAKUJITSU
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alright alright! miss ana, @delacourr, asked me to do a little colouring tutorial on how i do pale colouring on my gifs. i am going to do this for three examples, one animated, one a live action film and one for a two colour gif with writing in it.
i use photoshop cc 2018 which is set in german, but i will try to translate everything. english is not my first language, so please forgive me for any grammar mistakes.
this is a very long post, so i am putting this under a cut
now, for the live action film i used a scene from a something i am working on right now: pretty woman.
this is what our gif will look like without colouring and sharpening:
and this is what it will look like when i am finished:
these are 120 frames set to 0,02 speed.
let’s start. the first thing i do is that i start with a “levels” layer. setting this highly depends on what scene you are using. this is a rather bright scene so my settings are like this:
the gif will look like this:
now i am going to use a “curves” layer. here i normally click on “auto”, photoshop will now set it to an automatic setting. this helps me a lot, in this case it doesn’t change too much. it’s always up to you, but don’t overdo it. i chose these settings:
the gif looks like this now:
what i am doing now is something i do for almost all my gifs. i am choosing a gradient map. choosing the right colours it will give your gif a very nice look. for this one i chose a black&white map, with black being the foreground and white being the background layer. these are my settings:
i set the distort to diffuse glow, which i always use for gradient maps. the opacity is set to 71%. i normally have mine set to somewhere between 50-75%, depending on what looks best. the gif will look like this now:
next thing we want to do is a “vibrance” layer. these will, as the name says, control the vibrance of the gif. in pale colourings these are normally not as extreme and i used these settings for this gif:
this will make the gif look like this:
the next is “selective colour” and this is one of the most important. it will let you control the colours in this gif and potentially make them lighter, darker or manipulate them as a whole. i use a new selective colouring for each colour. the first thing here are the white tones:
this looks like a little, but it will show in the gif:
the next thing i do are the black tones. now here it is important to be careful. in a bright gif like this it will brighten up the black tones a little. but in a mostly dark gif it will make the whole dark areas look like there’s a very light white layer over them, which in 80% of the gifs i did looked not so good.
the gif:
almost invisible, i know.
now, next thing i do are the grays and these are the most important. they will change the whole gif, not just a certain area. my settings for the grays:
and the gif will now look like this:
it’s already a little brighter. in this case i am adding a “fotofilter”, this can look good, but be careful and don’t overdo it. it highly depends on your gif as well.
the gif looks like this:
now, i wasn’t quite satisfied, so i added some more light into the grays:
then i sharpened the gif and our final result looks like this:
great, now this is for a bright scene.
now, the next will be one of the two colour gifs with writing in it. unfortunately, i do not know how to describe it differently. the original gif looks like this:
and our final result is this:
first step is, again, a “levels” layer:
you will want to make this as bright as possible for the writing to be seen, but not too bright, as it will make the gray areas look a little weird. next thing we do is a “curves” layer. still, our only goal here is to make the writing stick out as much as possible without making it look too weird.
the gif looks like this now:
the next thing is a “vibrance” layer again, it won’t do a lot, depending on what colour and brightness the writing already is.
the gif:
and now “selective colouring” here is important to make the white areas brighter so they will stand out later:
and the gif is this now:
and now to the most important part. to make like two coloured we require a “gradient map” again. the colours you use are up to you, i am going to use pastel blue and white here. blue will be the foreground and white the background colour:
this time we let it stay at 100% and at “normal”. the gif will look like this:
at the bottom we still see the flag, but we do not want that so we will create a new layer and just use black to draw this part out. be careful to put this layer underneath the adjustment layers, so your layers look like this:
and the finished gif is this now:
great! you can do this with a lot of things, not only writings, though this is easiest and looks best. here are some other examples, where i used this technique:
now our last gif is a scene from frozen 2:
the finished gif will look like this:
again, we start with a “levels” layer. now, with animated scenes it’s a little easier to make the whole thing brighter. these are my settings here:
and the gif looks like this:
the next step is adding a “curves” layer. here i went with clicking on “auto” again, which resulted in this:
and the gif will look like this:
now, the next thing is “brightness/contrast” and this is really mostly to make this even brighter, i normally don’t do much on the contrast. in this case it looked better.
and it will make my gif look like this:
now i added a “levels” layer once again, but did not do much on it:
see? not much, but i thought it looked better:
next thing, i always put this after my general lightning settings, is a “vibrance” layer.
my gif:
and now, my best friend the “selective colour” layers. this time i started with the black tones, mainly so kristoff’s clothing here will not look too bright, as this looks really bad on dark tones in pale colourings.
barely visible maybe, but it did make a difference to me when creating this:
in-between all the selective colouring layers i put a “gradient map” in black and white again, mainly to have this a bit more “monochrome” look i like on my gifs:
i set this to 47% opacity this time, which looks like this:
so, to continue with the selective colouring layers, my next one here was the change the gray tones and make them brighter, as i thought the background here got a little too dark with my last layer.
and this is what it looks like now:
way better, if you ask me.
my next step was to change the “pink” tones a little, they’re especially visible on kristoff’s face here.
yes, i pretty much just turned them as bright as possible. this is the result:
the next thing i wanted to change a little were the butterflies in the background here. they’re very purple, but i wanted them to look a little brighter and with a little touch of pink.
and the gif:
the yellows were next and here those changed his hair and the sleeves. i didn’t change any of the colours in general, i just put more brightness into it.
and the gif:
and the very last step, on the reds, was to make his skin a little brighter, just a touch:
now, this is my finished and sharpened result:
so, that’s pretty much it! i do not normally have a special system i follow, it’s pretty much lightning - contrast - colours. don’t be afraid to also work with colour lookups sometimes, those can be a nice extra to your gif as well, depending on the scene. i think my best pieces advice would be these:
- selective colourings are your best friends. in general colouring, be it pale or pastel or vibrant, they always are. but especially in pale colourings the white, gray and black will definitely help make your gif look nice without being too bright
- please avoid using scenes with too much darkness. there are scenes that can be used, like this one from spiderman: far from home
where you have an all black background (there was some green, but this can be easily removed), but gifs with too much different colours in a dark scene will make a pastel colouring very difficult and maybe make it look too grainy. an example from my early days:
you see it yourself, it’s very grainy and pixel-y (and badly screencapped and badly sharpened, but that’s not the point)
- do not overdo it with the brightness in both the levels and brightness/contrast layers. i did this as well in my early days, making my gifs look very dull and gray in the end, we do not want that. try to work with selective colouring there
- if a scene just doesn’t want to look good with your colouring, remove it. i don’t know if others experience this, but in pale colouring i have noticed that even some of the brighter scenes with not a lot of details will sometimes just not work. it’s frustrating, but try to use another scene instead
ah, if someone wants the psds, just ask, i guess?
sooo, i hope this was helpful? i am not good at explaining things in english. if there are any more questions, please do not hesitate to send me an ask or a dm!
hey! i was wondering if you could explain us how you colored your ricky gifset bc it look gorgeous ^^
thank u!! you’re so sweet! and yes!
this is your gif with no coloring:
and the final result:
the first step is adding a levels layer, this is how i set up mine:
the gif will look like this:
now i add a selective color layer and set the blacks to 100%
our gif still looks dark, so i add some curves:
and we have this:
all right so now you add a white solid color layer, set to “exclusion” and reduce to opacity to something between 5% and 15%. that will depends of how bright your gif is.
the gif will look like this, i reduced mine to 10%:
ricky’s skin looks pink, so i will add a selective color and play with the reds and the yellows
these are my settings:
and the gif:
and now i add one more selective color layer and increase the blacks:
here how it looks:
yes! so this is our last step for a base coloring. if you want, you can save all these settings as a psd file and use when you’re giffing, but remember to always check if the selective colors match the scene.
BUT, if you want to achieve my ricky’s gif look, keep reading.
i add another selective color layer:
ricky looks like this:
now we’ll play with some hue/saturation! the first thing i do is reduce the master lightness to -20, this setting will apply to any scene you want, but i will also reduce blue and cyan saturation to -100 because i want to remove the color from the door behind ricky
here’s how the gif looks when i reduce the master lightness:
and when i remove the saturation from blue and cyan:
the final step is adding a levels layer and reduce the output levels to 200:
and we’re done!
i used the same settings on my seb gifs, but since the scenes were very dark i played a little bit more with the levels layers:
