Gif Coloring Tutorial
Requested by anon. Sorry for taking so long to post this!
This tutorial goes over how I color gifs, including tips for coloring dark scenes and scenes that are heavily filtered with a certain color (i.e blue scenes, yellow scenes, etc.).
We’ll be going from this:
To this:
Warning: This post is gonna be really long! (if the read more breaks blacklist “long post” or “usermerlin gif tutorial”)
*I’m using Photoshop CS5
1. Gif Making Basics (Note this part won’t include images since the anon specified coloring and avoiding noise I’m gonna focus on that)
First I take screencaps using Potplayer.
In PS I import the frames by selecting File --> Scripts --> “Load Multiple DICOM Files”
Once the images have loaded I go to the drop down menu on the animation window and select “Make frames from layers”.
Then I crop my gif using the crop tool. I put all the layers into a group (select all the layers and press ctrl + g (cmd + g if you’re using a Mac)
Now I sharpen my gif. I’ve created an action to speed up this process using user thepunisher’s action tutorial. I didn’t include the grouping of my layers in the action so that’s why I always group them before starting my action so that it works properly. My sharpening is pretty standard from what I’ve seen. I use smart sharpen:
Now I can start coloring!
2. Basic Coloring
In this section, I’ll be going over a basic, but vibrant, coloring. When making adjustments you have to be careful not to increase brightness or vibrance too much or your gif will become grainier. Same goes with making changes to the colors. It’s better to have more layers with slight adjustments
I always start by brightening up my gif. Sometimes I use curves to both brighten and adjust colors. For this particular gif I didn’t, but I use this adjustment often. User villainelle has a tutorial for using curves to color adjust here and so does user thepunisher here. They have slightly different approaches and I use either depending on the scene. I’ll also be explaining this adjustment more in the next section but I learned how to use it from them.
Step 1:
For this gif, I just started with an Exposure adjustment layer. Exposure allows you to change the tones of your document. Gamma adjusts midtones, offset adjusts shadows, and exposure adjusts highlights. It’s really helpful with brightening up dark scenes or heavily shadowed scenes. I usually only adjust the midtones/gamma. Here are my settings:
I increased the Gamma to 1.12
Step 2:
I then use a Brightness/Contrast layer to adjust the highlights (you could also do this with Exposure but I find Brightness more manageable). At this point, I’m only increasing the brightness. I won’t increase or decrease the contrast bar. Here are my settings:
I increased the Brightness to 34
Step 3:
After adjusting the brightness, I want to bring back some depth (I’m probably using this word incorrectly tbh) to my gif by increasing the contrast before moving on to color correction and vibrancy.
To increase the contrast I use a black and white gradient map and set it to soft light. Then I lower the opacity between 10%-50%, depending on the scene.
You could also use Levels or Brightness/Contrast but I find the gradient map is easy to control while also making the gif more neutral. For this gif, I set the transparency to 10% but could go a little higher because the scene is naturally bright. All these adjustments are really about your personal preference.
Step 4:
Now I can move on to the colors. For basic coloring I usually start by increasing the saturation. I use a Hue/Saturation layer because this way I can increase the saturation of everything. I feel like the Vibrance layer tends to just make the gif warmer rather than making the colors pop- and I have less control over individual colors. For this gif, I increased the saturation for all colors (”Master”) to 27:
Step 5:
After adjusting the vibrancy I move on to color adjustment. This can really vary based on preferences. I tend to prefer to make my gifs cooler in tone. I use Selective Color and Color Balance to manipulate the colors.
I started by adding a Color Balance layer to adjust the colors on Aziraphale’s face:
I increased the Cyan to 4, the Magenta to 3, and the Blue to 1 to make the skin tones more neutral. I’m moving the bars toward the colors I want to add. So if my gif is too yellow I’d move it toward blue and if it’s too red I’d move it toward cyan. Also note that I only made changes to the midtones. If I wanted to make changes to the darker or lighter parts of this gif I’d alter the shadows or highlights but I usually only do that for rainbow gifsets. Typically, I prefer Selective Color to make more drastic color alterations so I have more control over the specific color I’m changing.
*Be careful when making these types of changes. You don’t want to make drastic changes to the natural undertones of a person’s skin. Same goes when you’re brightening your gif. You can easily whitewash if you’re not careful. User amorverus has a great tutorial on avoiding whitewashing in coloring here .*
I also wanted to brighten up the gif more after this so I added a curves layer :
Then I used Selective Color to decrease the yellow tones in the White background:
I decreased it by 26. I almost always do this for scenes with white backgrounds or large blocks of white.
Step 6:
After I make some color adjustments I adjust the brightness and contrast again. I always add another Curves layer to increase the brightness of the shadows by slightly lifting the line on the bottom left:
Then I use Levels to change the contrast of my tones. I usually increase the contrast by moving the left hand point slightly to the right:
After that I add another Curves layer, decreasing the shadow and increasing the highlights like this:
I feel like this adds some nice depth to my gif and brings out the colors more. The amount I decrease or increase the curve depends on the gif itself, so definitely play around with this.
Step 7:
Now I go back to make some last color changes. I added another Selective Color layer and increased the Black on Whites:
Finally, I added another Selective Color layer adjusting the Whites again. I decreased the Yellow again and also increased the Cyan and Magenta to make the blue in the sky pop a little more:
I used a layer mask to erase this layer on Aziraphale so the change is only apparent on the sky.
Now I’m done! Here’s the same method on two other scenes:
And I uploaded the .psds (dl here) so you can take a closer look at what I did in Photoshop. Keep in mind that I don’t always follow these steps in the exact same order. Psd #3 features the curves color adjustment method and has some more adjustments. It really depends on the scene itself and the mood I’m in. Practicing a lot will build your familiarity with the different adjustments and hopefully boost your confidence in making your own coloring!
3. Hard to Color Scenes
Blue/Yellow/Green/Red Scenes + Dark Scenes
These types of scenes can be hell to color but there are some techniques to help balance the colors so that you have something that’s easier to work with.
For general dark scenes, adjusting the Exposure can be really helpful. Unfortunately increasing the Gamma or Exposure too much can make the gif grainy so be careful when using it. Consider using it in combination with Brightness/Contrast and Curves to avoid making drastic changes.
Another helpful adjustment layer is the curves layer. As the tutorials linked above explain, using the midtone or highlight dropper tool can help adjust the presence of red, green, and blue in your gif. Photoshop will balance against the color you select.
Let’s take this scene for example:
This scene is really yellow. Using color balance or selective color to balance it out could help but given how yellow it is, you’d need to use a lot of these layers to gradually change the colors or you’d make your gif too grainy. Using Curves, we can adjust colors with less layers and hopefully introduce less grain (sometimes this type of adjustment can result in too drastic a change, so your gif becomes hella grainy so be careful). I used the midtone dropper around here:
And got this:
Here’s the Curves layer:
The shadows are a little more intense than they were to begin with but that’s easier to adjust. You could also keep messing around with the dropper so the scene doesn’t become darker. You could it make it slightly less yellow and then finish the rest with color balance and selective color. Either way, I’m satisfied with this so now I can continue coloring:
Here’s an example of a dark and blue scene:
Usually for darker scenes, I use the midtone dropper but that wasn’t resulting in a change I was happy with. I used the highlight dropper instead, clicking on the flecks of snow in the bottom right:
Here’s the Curves layer:
And here’s the final gif after coloring:
This method is great for making big changes to the lighting and colors of your gifs.
HQ GIF Tips:
Save Settings:
I save my gifs with Diffusion because I find that the dithering is usually less noticeable that way, so my gif looks smoother. Pattern can also look really nice though, depending on your coloring. Try out both and see which you prefer! Here are my settings:
Coloring:
Making drastic changes all at once can make your gifs grainier. Be careful not to change a color too much one one Selective Color or Color Balance layer. It’s better to make smaller changes over multiple layers. Same goes for increasing brightness and vibrance.
Source:
Use the highest quality video source you can. That’s an easy way to make HQ gifs. Blu Ray or DVD quality is better than Itunes for example and both of those will be better than clips from Youtube. If the file size is bigger that typically means there less compression so the quality will be better. If you can’t find larger sizes or you don’t have the space or time to save larger files, just make sure it’s at least 1080p. Keep in mind that now that gifs are converted to gifv, your gifs might look grainy or blurry when you post them even if they look fine when you save them. You can go back and mess with the coloring to see if this helps but otherwise there’s not much you can do about the conversion.
Those are all the tips I have for now! If anything doesn’t make sense or you have any questions please let me know.