Colouring rainbow gifs
The lovely @buckiecap and @djarsdin requested a tutorial of some gifs from this TFATWS rainbow set.
My colouring process is kinda chaotic and it always depends on the gif itself. These three gifs will highlight the similarities and differences in how I colour my rainbow gifs.
You’ll need some understanding of basic gif making and adjustments. I use Photoshop 2021 but I imagine these processes will still work in other versions.
Some basic tips:
When doing rainbow sets, once I've got my base gif ready, I always make a hue/saturation layer on saturation +100 so I can see what colours I'm working with. I just keep it hidden so i can check how my colours are doing throughout the editing process.
Also something to stick at the back of your mind: you want your final gif to be as “monochromatic” as possible - make sure your final palette will be only black + shades of whatever colour you're targeting. This is not only to make the gif as colour-focussed as possible, but it also helps with saving your gif under 10mb. That saturation +100 layer I always keep hidden at the bottom of my gif so I can keep an eye on what colours are present.
It’s also helpful to understand how RGB and CMYK colours work and what to add/subtract when you want to bring out a certain colour. A good example of this is with Colour Balance:
You’ll notice the colours on the left are Cyan, Magenta and Yellow (CMYK), while the other side is Red, Green and Blue (RBG). So if you want more cyan in your image, you’d push the bar towards cyan, but then you’re compromising the reds. In Selective Colour adjustments, the panel is reversed.
This knowledge is absolutely necessary when you’re doing any adjustment, so keep this in the back of your mind as I work through the tutorial.
Green gif - Eli's door
So I start with my hue/saturation on saturation +100 to check what I’m working with here. This gif of Isaiah's grandson opening the door has green, yellow and red as the dominant colours, and I can see a bit of cyan on the right. I’ll keep that hue/saturation layer hidden as a reference.
Normally when I make gifs I start with a curve or levels layer to get any unwanted hues or create a more visible scene. But in this gif, I'm pretty happy with the colours, so I'm just using a simple curves adjustment, because I want to have whatever is behind the door as the ‘background’ and the door frame is the ‘foreground’, so only a slight adjustment is needed here.
Since the colours are already prominent, I'm going to make the green more visible and vibrant. I do this by using selective colour in the green colour to make the green stand out. When thinking of CMYK adjustments, you might think that Magenta -100 would work, as that normally pushes the greens, but I find that this makes things grainy and patchy looking, as you can see here:
Instead, I’m enhancing cyans and yellows, and only pushing the magenta back just a little bit towards green. I’m not sure why green specifically does this, but it’s useful to know this when you’re colouring.
With the yellows, I want to push those more as well, since the amount of yellow usually influences the green-ness of the gif.. I'm also going to max yellow too since that will also make the green pop, but I also have to be careful not to distort the skin colour too much. I also want to balance the skin tone with a little redness so he doesn’t look like he has jaundice (skin tone will be explored later in the gif process)
I've added another selective colour layer on top of that, only adjusting the greens just to make it pop a little more. Don’t be afraid to use more than one selective layer, this can really bring out vibrant colours if you use it right.
Just to get some more depth, I add a colour balance layer, again just subtly pushing the cyan and yellow up and not playing with the green too much. Then my usual last layers are with a vibrance and brightness/contrast - I’m usually quite generous with contrast so I can bring out the different shades and it makes things a little more vibrant too.
This next step is really important when colouring people with dark skin - you want to lower the redness from their skin so they don't look unnaturally orange, as you can see here:
There is a fantastic tutorial here about colouring dark skin tones and avoiding the orange-washed look, and I recommend all gif makers to take note! It's difficult especially when doing rainbow gifs, and it takes some practice. I do this with a hue/saturation layer, and specifically targeting red and yellow and reducing saturation. I might need to play with selective colour or colour balance to get it right. Luckily Eli doesn’t move around too much, so I can use a mask to adjust only his face.
And that’s the end product! now just ignore me as I re-upload the green gif in my set so you don’t see such a horrible jaudiced skin tone sldkfjsldkf
Yellow gif - Karli vs Sam
I'm gonna be completely honest here - this gif was very tricky to do. I actually have about three different versions of it. At first I thought "this is the yellow gif so I'm only going to have yellow tones", and did selective colour to get rid of any traces of green AND red, because I didn't want any orange at all. It ended up looking quite dull:
I mean.. yeah it’s yellow........... but it’s kinda boring. So I deleted all adjustments and watched the raw gif, and noted the orange light contrasting with the pale light. The raw gif itself already had some beautiful lighting - why get rid of it? It depends on what you want, but I like my rainbow gifs to have a different colour there to contrast with the main colour.
Starting off with a hue/saturation layer with saturation 100+, I can see there are clearly yellows and reds and a bit of green on the ceiling.
I thought the contrast of the orange and pale lighting was too good to mess up so I started with that. My first layers are vibrance and brightness/contrast to exaggerate the silhouettes and bring out the colours that are already there.
I added a channel mixer layer to narrow down the colours. I wanted to fill the white bits with yellow, and with channel mixer I’m able to manipulate colours into something else while still looking natural and blended. I won’t be doing too much colour manipulating here so the settings are very minimal. I don’t know how to explain it but it just takes a little fiddling to figure out what works for your gif. You’ll notice the white reflections on the ceiling are now a solid yellow colour:
Next is a colour balance layer. I'm basically trying to bring out the yellow out. This is really just trial and error. I added a bit of magenta to bring the depth of the orange colours in the darker shades:
Now for selective colour. I'm often adjusting all of these while hiding/showing the hue/saturation layer I have kept at the bottom. This time, I’m aiming to subtract the reds and bring it down to a warm orange, and I do that by bringing it towards cyan/away from red, and away from magenta/towards green.
Then I max out the yellows so it becomes the most dominant colour. I've also manipulated the green to make sure it is excluded from the gif - again, checking with the hue/saturation layer at the bottom, while keeping my eye on the ceiling and other places where I’ve noticed green lurking about. I don’t want any unwanted shades ending up in the final colour table.
Finally, I finish with yet another vibrance and brightness/contrast layer, just because I like things bright and vibrant!
And there it is! The orange is still there and adds a contrast, but you can tell that the main colour is the yellow. This gif seems very straightforward but I assure you, it took me quite a while to get this one right. This gif was a joy to work on because Sam was so very extra in this fight sequence lolll
Pink gif - suspicious mechanical grenade? idk
While this gif may look simple, it actually took a couple of tries before I got the colouring right. You'll notice when the ball activates, there is a bright green light that highlights the gas released and it reflects on the chair legs and carpet.
At first I tried this with the above mentioned selective colour method - which I thought turned out okay but it didn't sit with me right. Notice the reflection of the blue light on the carpet - it definitely isn't blue and more like a green-orangey kinda colour, and it doesn't look natural at all.
So I re-started from the beginning and had a look at what I’m working with, starting with hue/saturation at saturation +100. I can see that the original gif has red and green as the dominant colours, with yellow bits blending the two on the carpet. That’s what I was having issues with the selective colour - so I’ll be doing it differently.
Enter: channel mixer. I’m gonna be honest............. I have ZERO idea how the channel mixer really works! It’s all a matter of trial and error, but I’ll try and explain my process step by step.
I normally start in the blue channel (again - no idea why, it just works for me). I start with the reds, and I know if I go over 0, it will push the reds towards cyan, which will get it more purple-y:
Ooooh looking good!!! then I want to push the greens towards magenta, so that needs to go over 0 as well:
Woohoo! It’s already starting to look good. The green light and the way it blends into the red/pinks have all been completely changed into the cyan hues, so there’s a perfect reflection you can see on the carpet! Yay! I had a fiddle with the green and red channels but nothing too drastic. Here are the settings:
Even with just the single adjustment, I was already pretty happy with it and only did a few touch ups: I added a selective colour layer to bring out a more pinky-purpley colour, then a levels layer to brighten things up. It might seem very backwards to add a brightening tool at the end, but I didn’t want to mess up the original colour shades because I liked having the dark shadows lit up by the ball’s light.
And that’s it! Only three adjustment layers, but it took some time to play with the different adjustments and what worked best. Channel mixer can be really intimidating but it works like a charm when you manage to figure it out.
the end!
Finally I have to give credit to some amazing content creators and their brilliant colouring tutorials that have made such a huge impact in the way I edit. Some brilliant guides include:
this colouring tutorial by @favreaus
this colouring tutorial by @inejz-ghafa
this colouring tutorial by @meliorn
I hope this tutorial has been helpful! I’ve tried to explain myself as best I can, but let me know if you’d like any clarification or have any questions. I’m still learning how to do things, and honestly most times it’s just randomly clicking things until something works out!