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HOW I TRY TO AVOID WHITEWASHING MY GIFS (FOR THE PITT)

hey! so, the show i've undoubtedly been giffing the most lately is the pitt, which features a whole lot of characters of color! it also happens to be a show with mostly white & cool toned backgrounds and bright lighting. unfortunately, those are circumstances in which it can become really easy for gifs to slide into whitewashing territory - whitewashing in this case meaning that characters of color are colored to be a lot lighter than they were in the unedited version of the scene.

DISCLAIMER: these are some examples of whitewashing that i encounter in my gifmaking process and actively try to avoid. this is by no means comprehensive, nor am i any kind of authority on what does or does not constitute whitewashing. furthermore, i myself have an issue where gifs look surprisingly different on tumblr on my pc vs my tablet, so truly, i think it can even depend on what device you're viewing gifs on. there are some cases that are pretty straightforward to me, but sometimes my tablet makes gifs - that looked perfectly fine on my computer - suddenly look kind of too pale.

TO NON-GIFMAKERS: absolutely feel free to look at these examples and if gifs strike you as way too pale for what you saw on screen just consider not interacting with that set. maybe you might even shoot the creator an ask/reply telling them that they may have veered into whitewashing.

okay, now that that's out of the way, let's just take a quick look at what i mean when i say whitewashing - let's look at this (extreme, cartoonish) example:

now you might say, "that's absurd, nobody would color it that way," but the thing is, something like this in different forms is easier to get to while coloring a gif than one might think.

and both skin tones (again... duh) and lighting can differ drastically from character to character and scene to scene. i've tried to assemble a few gifs of different characters of color to explain what i try to avoid and how i avoid it when i color.

BRIGHTNESS & CURVES

the most obvious and probably the most widespread (i think) thing is that when you originally screencap a show/import a video into photoshop, it's kinda dark. it just looks nicer to most gifmakers when we make it a little brighter. the issue with that can come when we do too much with our curve or brightness layers.

(the little circles show shades that i picked with the color picker tool at hopefully pretty much the same spot for all four gifs)

so you can see that i'm a bit of a hypocrite - i made her lighter with my standard psd! that's why i say that i personally think this is a matter of degrees. as far as i'm aware the difference between the unedited and second gif that shows how i usually color is within the margins. it's still fairly vibrant and brown whereas with the two lower gifs i'm firmly in pink/light beige territory (which is not sepideh moafi's skin color).

this one's pretty easy to avoid, in my opinion: just don't go too far with curves or brightness. i try to keep it in that margin that still approximates the color of the unedited version.

THE BLUES & GREENS

i feel like this is the most complex one. like i said, the pitt is a show with a lot of blue in the background and what can happen is that in trying to make those colors pop or reducing reds & yellows, we distort skin tones maybe a little too much.

layers this can become an issue in: selective color, color balance, levels, channel mixer, hue/saturation.

how i try to avoid this:

selective color: the red & yellow tabs of selective colors are crucial to me here. in those, i try not to increase the cyan or decrease the magenta or yellow too much -> of course it depends on the scene! if it's a very yellow scene, i can probably decrease the yellows of red or yellow without running the risk of actual whitewashing

levels: i usually keep my hands off the individual color levels for this - that's just a personal preference, though. if used, i'd apply the rules of color balance and channel mixer

color balance: i pretty much only use "shadows" and "lights" for color balance and here i try to take care with the cyan/red slider (and in some rare instances the yellow/blue slider) -> too much cyan and i create that pink-ish hue in the spots where the light hits the character, and that doesn't really belong there; with other characters too much cyan almost bleaches them out

channel mixer: no increasing reds in the green or the blue channel, basically

i made another example for this in combination with increased curves/brightness:

VIBRANCE

i don't see this one as often anymore because the pale gif trend was years and years ago (and personally, i'll never participate in it again bc i didn't like it), but for completion's sake i wanted to include it because pale gifs had a HUGE whitewashing problem.

as you can see, victoria looks sort of grey and ashy in the bottom two gifs. if you add more brightness/curves on top of that it becomes very, very pale which was sort of the trend for a while.

again, easy to avoid because i have to add a hue/saturation or vibrance layer and drag the dials into the negatives.

PALE COLOR GRADED/LIGHTING SCENES

sometimes the show does the deed itself, although i'm not super sure if that can still be qualified as whitewashing. in any case, sometimes i'll load screencaps into photoshop and go, "why does she look so pale??? i've giffed her before and she didn't remotely look like this."

at that point, i come to kind of a crossroad - do i try to color correct in addition to my usual coloring or do i just proceed as normal and go off of the skin tone presented to me in the scene?

i skew towards the latter... the top two look bad To Me but i don't know if there's an actual right answer to this conundrum, to be honest.

and that's it for now!! i hope this is maybe a little helpful? again, this is not meant to encompass everything or even go into much detail on individual colorings but moreso the general considerations i try to make when i gif. i hope it makes sense! tysm for reading!!

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