#ps stuff

[sandushengshou]

Hi! Hi! I really like your blog and the jc gifs that you make and I've wanted to ask this question for a long time but I'm shy.

How do you make a scene in which the character looks dark and blue, and can get more warmer nuances to get the skin color. I'm really terrible when I do a dark scene the character disappears it's terrible.

Thanks for your answer, Jackie.

First of all, you like JC? Let’s be besties! Second, I’m sorry it took me days to get to this :( Character looks dark and blue. You mean something like this?

For scenes like this one, my first layer will either be a neutral selective color one or channel mixer. I used channel mixer this time -  it’s only to reduce that cyan tint and add just the tiniest bit of color to his face. So on the Red channel, I move the slider up to +140 on the red, +10 on the green, and +5 on the blue. Now on the Blue channel, I drag the blue slider down to +82. You get this!

Lan Wangji is not a smurf anymore! But it’s still not great so to brighten up the gif, I use a Curves layer on screen mode at 30% opacity and add some Contrast. Now for more color, I use Levels.

With the cyan tint removed, I have a gif ready to color! I use Selective Color layers at this point (red, neutral, and cyan), but you can use other adjustment layers ofc. This is my final gif after that. 

And to show the difference!

I’m adding these two links as well. I hope this helped, anon! 

[mcgregor]

Succumbed to the trend lol, coming soon-ish 👀

[jennyslcte]

RINA, a character graphic template.

FONTS USED: Gobold

please don’t redistribute.

only a little bit of photoshop knowledge is needed for this template

you can edit it however you’d like but please don’t make it unrecognizable.

and most importantly, i hope you enjoy!

PURCHASE HERE FOR $3.00.

[smollyoda]

Hi! Your gifs are so beautiful!! I’m not sure if you’ve ever done a gif tutorial but how on earth do you make them so sharp!? I stare in awe at them constantly!! Any tips for someone who is trying to learn how to gif would be most appreciated. Thanks!

anon, you're too kind! thank you so much!!💌

I'm no ps wizard, and I’ve never done a tutorial but I do love talking about ps so I can try to give you some tips. I colour each scene differently so these are just basic for trying to keep your gifs crisp. (english isn't my first language and I run ps in danish so bear with me)

✿ Footage - always try to get the best footage you can! I recommend using 2160p or 1080p ddls, not all 2160p files will be same quality, as a guideline I always go for the bigger file.

✿ Brightening and contrast - both can be super harsh on the quality! two things I use that help me are 1. use a gradient map, set to B/W, then set layer from normal to luminosity, I find this adds depth in a more gentle way than just using contrast and you can adjust easily by changing the opacity. 2. for both contrast and brightening certain areas I use selective colours and toggle the black option for the black and white in each their direction. try to be gentle when colouring and play around with different setting, you can always group with ctrl+g and try again without losing your colouring!

✿ Sharpening/export settings - I export my gifs as adaptive/selective + noise, I recommend trying some different ones to get a feel for what they do to a gif! for sharpening I use the same smart sharpen settings 9/10 times, occasionally I’ll use 0,5 for a blurry gif or 0,3 for a 268px gif.

✿ Editing footage -probably the only unique(ish) tip I can give as I haven’t seen other creators talk about it. for certain scenes that are very dark, tinted or otherwise hard to colour in ps without losing quality, I sometimes edit the footage in my media playback program (I use potplayer) before I colour in ps.

I did this with my #soft frog parents set, this is the scene:

In potplayer I edited brightness, contrast and hue

Now editing in ps is much easier, let me know if you need further explanation on this!

✿ and mostly have fun!!! play around and try different stuff!! ✿

[userscully]

Hi I haven’t made gifs in almost 2 years and I’m wondering if there’s any tips or gif tutorials you know or steps you take to get your gifs so HD? But ofc if you don’t share stuff like that I understand completely I’m just trying to figure my way back into gif making again ♥️

hi nonnie! this got kinda long lol

my main recommendation is this tutorial by chloezhao; it's super detailed and easy to follow, and will get you through the whole process from acquiring your files to sharpening and coloring your gifs. an additional tutorial i strongly recommend is this one by anya-chalotra (also every other tutorial in her resources tag is fantastic); it goes further into sharpening and, really importantly, save settings—that's a part of giffing that's often overlooked but has a major impact on how your stuff ends up looking. i personally save with adaptive, diffusion (100%), bicubic, but every other gifmaker will have a different take on this, so try it out for yourself and see what you like!

now, those tutorials combined are pretty all-encompassing, so some of the following may be redundant, but here are my personal tips:

unless you have no other option available, NEVER GO FOR FILES BELOW 1080p—i can't stress this enough. also, use screencaps instead of screen-recording, and don't skip frames.

if you gif with the video timeline, always drag your saved gif back into photoshop and fix the frame rate!! the first tutorial goes into this if you don't know what i'm talking about, but yeah, super important. i didn't do this until recently cause i was lazy and didn't think it made that big a difference, but since i've started taking that extra step i look at my previous gifs and think it's SO NOTICEABLE how much "choppier" they are.

sharpening is king. the settings shown on that first tutorial are a great base to start, and the second offers some more options, but i really encourage playing around with the amount/radius settings, as well as with checking legacy & accuracy on and off (which are shown when you click on the little cog icon in smart sharpen), to find a setting that you really love. some ppl like smoother gifs, others like theirs really sharp—it's really a matter of personal taste, so trying out those adjustments for yourself will help you understand how sharpening works and let you find your own preference.

all that being said, sharpening is not one-size-fits-all. depending on how something was filmed and lit, when it came out, how much grain there is on the file, etc, you might have to make little (or big) adjustments to your sharpen settings. this is why it's so important to understand how this tool works instead of just blindly inputting numbers.

the black/white eye droppers within the curves tool are your best friends. the first tutorial goes over how this works.

beware of vibrance and saturation. i personally never use vibrance, and saturation requires a gentle touch. overusing either of these tools can really destroy the quality of a gif—it pays off to build up your coloring by gradually stacking other adjustment layers.

channel mixer my beloved. i never used this adjustment at the start because i had no clue how it worked, but since i've learned by using it over time it's become literally my favorite tool for coloring—it can seriously work miracles.

a little noise can go a long way. sometimes messing around with sharpening still doesn't get your gif looking like you want it, quality-wise, and adding a noise filter can a) make your gif look sharper, b) make your gif look more uniform when the file has some annoying grain you can't get rid of, and c) just give it some personality! but this is totally a personal preference, as some people, like i mentioned, will want their gifs as smooth and noiseless as possible.

that's all i can think of for now! i've never done tutorials myself and i have a tendency to ramble and overexplain, but if you have questions abt specific things you can always ask me and i'll try my best to put something together or redirect you to another tutorial

[uuuhshiny]

whoa, how'd you manage to bring the colours back like that on that frankie set? :o very impressive!

Thanks :)

this is how my psd looks for one of the gifs (each one requires different approach sometimes)

I tend to add several brightening layers, they look smoothly like that. Then colouring. Channel mixer makes wonders. Thanks @kiraslight for introducing me to it :) 

But mostly this is just tryouts of everything and hoping it works.

[anarchxst]

MENU

[klutcherov]

Hi! I wanted to let you know that I really love you gifs😍 they are all so prettyyy! also I wanted to ask you since you are an expert what image size (tumblr dimensions) did you use for your Adam boqvist gifs? I’m learning to gif and for the love of god I can’t get them right lol

yeah definitely not an expert but i can definitely answer this question. I’m going to assume that you’re using ps to make gifs, and know the basics on how to get to this point. (If not i can make a more in-depth tutorial on gif making.) 

so tumblr’s size limit is based on pixels. here’s a graphic that shows the specific width sizes for full, half and third sized gifs. 

under the cut im going to show how to size this gif of adam

im gonna show you how i made the full width gif of adam but the same steps can be applied to the half width ones. 

step 1: change image length

typically the image size adjustments will defult in percentage 

so you want to change that to pixels 

from here you want to change the width to 540 pixels 

step 2: canvas size 

this step is how i change the height of my gifs. i didn’t screeshot it but for this you go to canvas size right under image size 

this is where you change the height. for full-width gifs i typically do 250 pixels unless there is something that i don’t want to crop out, then ill do either 260 or 270 but never more than that. honestly, you don’t need to change the height at all its really for aesthetic purposes of making all the gifs look uniform (in my opinion). 

after you change the height and click okay its gonna ask you this 

obviously proceed bc the point of this step is to crop the gif essentially 

next its going to show you a preview of the gif with its new dimensions 

now unless you’re okay with the suggested crop, which i usually am not bc it crops from both the top and bottom and typicall i only crop from the bottom. im not sure what you’re using but for mac i use command+t for the free transform feature. this is where you adjust what part of the gif to crop off. 

after that step you’re done. 

i hope this was helpful and not to long but i wish there was someone who made something like this for me when i was first starting out.