#userlyrae

[olympain]

hi, i’m sorry for this question but do you allow people to repost your gifs? i saw them on twitter yesterday and knowing how people are over there i was wondering if that is something you’re okay with...

Hi, no I don't allow my gifs to be reposted unless I have been asked first. Thank you for reaching out though.

Twitter reposters are a pest and there's not much I can do as they tend to rack up a lot of engagement over stolen gifs there.

[devonizara]

nym! may i bother you for a second? do you have any tutorials on how you make your gifs? would you mind sharing your settings with me? i’ve been having a hard time with the quality of mine and yours always look so crispy and nice... if that would be okay for you to share, it would be highly appreciated! 🫶🏻

I've never made a gif tutorial before, because I've always been worried my thought process will be too jumbled for anyone to understand, but I'll do my best to give you the nutshell version (+ my settings).

Firstly, I have to say that I am consistently always returning to this tutorial by kylos for my coloring, and they also have a pretty helpful guide on the overall technical gist of how to start giffing.

So, let's get into how I make gifs!

(What we're working with after sharpening, but before coloring)

I use KMPlayer to get my caps, and for the Sequel Trilogy at least, I broke down and downloaded extremely high quality copies (they're about 8gb per file), but this is not necessary. Many of the files I use for my gifs are anywhere between 2gb to 3gb: they're not always the clearest, but they work and they're not a requirement imo, it's just that I love seeing all the details in the sequels (and for TROS, it's necessary in order to gif the sand burrows sequence).

Once I load my caps into Photoshop, I crop my gif. Photoshop is helpful, where they actually have presets for the dimensions you can use. Any of them will do, but if you're setting out to make a mobile header, you'll want to go with the 16 x 9 setting.

For the sake of this tutorial, I'm sticking with my tried and true 2x3, though. The next thing I do is resize it, Tumblr's width dimensions right now are 540, so I always go with that for the width of my big gifs.

Now, what I've learned is what you choose on the drop down menu, will impact how your gif looks. For a brief period in time, I was using billenial, but I didn't like how it made my gifs look (I think they were coming out fuzzier in a way I disliked), so I always select bicubic (best for smooth gradients).

To me, this tends to make the gif look smoother, anyway, once I've resized it down.

Now, from here I fucking cheat, lmao. I made an action years ago to deal with the technical aspect of animating a gif cos I still get confused by that, so I click that until it goes to the portion where I need to start sharpening my gif:

As you can see, I have a few actions saved for sharpening: it's cos depending on the quality of the file I'm working on, I'll shift how I sharpen it to make sure it doesn't lower the actual quality of the gif. Right now, though, my primary sharpening settings are this:

My first smart sharpening layer:

Then, I have a Gaussian blur layer. Since I don't want the gif to be too blurry, I have lowered the opacity of this layer to ensure it doesn't overwhelm the gif itself:

And then I do one last smart sharpening layer, with these settings:

Now that the sharpening is done, I can move into the coloring stage! The first thing I do is I try to brighten up the image/gently color correct. The easiest way to start this is by using the white point color dropper in the curves layer:

What you'll do is look for the brightest corner of the image, click on it with this tool, and it'll color correct for you. This step involves a lot of trial and error, and sometimes I scrap it altogether and use exposure and channel mixer for more control on the outcome of the coloring.

I clicked on the white walls to the left of Rey, and that worked fairly well in terms of coloring. It's a tad more red leaning than I'd like, so I lowered the opacity of that layer to 74% (I always lower the opacity on the "fill" area rather than the actual opacity, cos I'm curious like that), and then I took the white line in the curves box, which designates the lighting/shadows, and I pulled it down a bit to give it a more natural look.

From there, I always add a levels layer: it's great for adjusting highlights and shadows in my opinion. I always bump up the white pointer until I'm happy with the brightness, and then I lower the black pointer until the gif has the depth I want (but not too much, cos I'll go back and edit it with selective coloring later). Depending on the gif, I might use the grey pointer in the middle, which brightens the overall gif, though it's not super often this is necessary.

Now, Rey's still looking a little too red for my liking, but I like the overall brightness of this gif (so far), so I'm gonna get into the weeds of working on the actual coloring. My first trick is adding a vibrance layer:

Lowering the saturation is a great way to get rid of any orange hues on a characters skin, while vibrance adds a (normal) level of color to their skin and doesn't make them look like a corpse, basically lmfao. I actually learned this trick through this wonderful anti orange-washing tutorial, which if you're giving any characters of color, is critical reading.

So now I move onto selective coloring, this one's a very play at your own leisure thing. I tend to work the most with the Reds, Neutrals, and Blacks, to tweak the coloring to get the result I want. This is what my settings look like so far:

There was some pinkish areas in the canvas (near Rey's hairline, her shoulders, and obviously her mouth) so I went ahead and messed with the magentas as well - selective coloring is probably the most important part of any of my gifs, not only does it help me get the tint that I want (or help me remove any tones that I don't want), it's also my primary tool in avoiding whitewashing, next to the vibrance tool - if I were giffing Poe or Finn, there'd probably be at least two or three additional selective coloring layers to make sure their skin tones were the right shade.

So, right now our Rey gif is looking like this:

Which is honestly fine, but I want the background to be a little less neutral. So I'm adding a channel mix layer, and going to the blues: from what I can tell, the lights behind Rey are a bit greenish in tone, so I'm gonna add more blue to the greens in the image:

Now, this made Rey's face a bit more cool/pink than I want, so I'm gonna add another selective color layer, and add more yellow to the reds:

There's still not as much depth to the gif here as I'd like, so I'm gonna add a little more to the neutrals and blacks:

Honestly, we could stop here, but I want to add a little more brightness to the gif (not much), so I'm gonna add a brightness/contrast layer:

Now that I'm satisfied with how the gif looks, I'm gonna run my action to change the speed the gif plays at to 0.05 (PS automatically sets it to 0.03 which is like watching the scene on fast forward), and our result is this:

And that's my usual process! I've gone through many "style evolutions" across the years with my coloring, so my biggest piece of advice is to just go ham fucking wild. Experiment, figure out what works for you: there was a time where I relied on photo filters to color correct my gifs and I used that for almost two years! Then I moved onto color balance for almost a year, I think, until I quit liking how it looked and I landed on my current method.

My other piece of advice is to look up as many giffing tutorials as you can find. I'm only as familiar with all these tricks because I'm constantly reading other people's tutorials and experimenting with their tips and tricks, blending them together until I find my own rhythm. @usergif has a directory of gif tutorials that I frequent often tbh!

And please lemme know if anything here doesn't make sense, or if you have any further questions about the process!

[devonizara]

i have a similar feeling towards my own stories, there will always be one that tops all of the others. your work with poelya is so throughout and passionate, it makes sense that they will always have that spark going for you.

🥺 thank you Lyra, that means sm to me!! Yeah, I often ask, "what did I put in them?" and the answer really just boils down to everything, especially in that initial run for Not A Ghost Story: I was coming to terms with the fact that I might be demi, and Volya became my outlet for that, and then of course, that one text post about how sometimes you love a character it goes beyond most fandom conventions and you're this close to believing in them like a patron saint, is also very poelya coded (god, I added so much religious symbolism to their relationship...)

And then I went even more insane and explicitly drew parallels between them and Anakin/Padmé and Obi-Wan/Satine. How am I even supposed to top that? I popped off so hard the first time that making another OC or self-insert that's a tad more "normal" has me like. okay but why 🤣😅

(art by @hermitmoss)

[devonizara]

your coloring on that rey gifset is breathtakingly beautiful, i loved it! 🫶🏻

EEE THANK YOU SO MUCH 🥺 I was so so proud of how the coloring ended up shaking out, I'm not even gonna lie!

[devonizara]

i knew from your posts that people being inconvenient on tags sucked ass, but having them be like that on my gifsets is a whole new world of getting pissed as fuck 💀 any tips on how to not lose your mind over it?

I'm sorry you're having to deal with it, it can be truly maddening and the quickest way of burning out on creating (this website is actually so harmful to creatives, it's unreal).

Over the years, I learned to start blocking them as they crop up. If someone's gonna reblog a set once to be a dick, they'll do it again. Unfortunately, it has the side effect of leaving Tumblr feeling especially inactive, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

For fandoms I make sets for that I know get a lot of hate, I've made DNI banners to put in the footer of my post (such as my sequels gifsets). It doesn't always work, but if someone ignores an actual boundary just to be a smug asshole, then I feel particularly valid in blocking them about it.

Truthfully though, for my own mental health, I had to begin immediately muting my own posts. It's not a great solution, because I miss any compliments or meta that might get added to my sets, but it's better than opening my activity feed and finding a sea of negativity or extremely graphic sexual content there.

[devonizara]

have you heard about the cozy game unpacking? whenever i play it i just feel like it’s a game that screams tegan and that you’d definitely enjoy playing it

Oh! No I haven't, but it looks really cute! I'm flattered you thought of me 🥺 I've gotten really into Dreamlight Valley thanks to my best friend, and it's got me reconsidering my stance on cozier games so maybe I'll revisit this one some day!

[emmaharwoods]

aashna, hi! would it be okay for me to ask you how you edited this picture? i’m in love with how it looks and i’d love to learn how to do that. if you don’t mind and it isn’t much of a bother, of course.

hi, i cropped it to 540px by 800px, sharpened using this action and added an exposure layer and a selective color layer. i don't have the exact psd but the settings were probably something similar to this

[devonizara]

sorry for spamming your posts with likes [hides] i just got home after a long day and had like 500+ plus posts on my feed so i just bookmarked them because i like reading your takes/seeing your reblogs hehe

oh, no need to apologize!! It's always so much fun to see people going through my posts, it usually brings stuff back to my attention that I completely forgot about!

I hope today goes really well for you! 💜