sunsets fade

four things i keep in mind when i want to make a colourful gif:

scenes should have backgrounds that aren't complicated or full of other objects (especially if they're dark)

scenes should have backgrounds with colours that are easy to manipulate. i.e. a simple blue background will be much easier to change than a background that has a mixture of green, red, and brown.

scenes shouldn't have a lot of movement. scenes with limited movement will save you from a migraine.

avoid dark scenes!!! it's really hard to colour a dark scene, and most of the time, it doesn't turn out looking as vibrant as other scenes.

this alina scene from shadow and bone isn't the best because the lighting is on the darker side, but the relatively solid blue/green background made it doable. that being said, it would have been much less time-consuming if it was brighter.

step one: brightness.

the first thing i always do is click on "brightness/contrast." leave the toggles at 0, but change the blending mode to screen. this generally gives you a decent brightness without overdoing it.

now, if this was a regular gifset, i would move on to "curves." for a vibrant colouring set, i leave that for last. the results turn out much better if your curves layers are on top of your colouring layers; order layer matters!

step 2: hue/saturation.

generally, you won't want to touch this too much because it changes the overall appearance of your gif and can affect things like skin tone. however, you do want to move it subtly either to the left or right depending on what colour you want your final gif to be! think of it this way: the point of hue/saturation is to get your gif (especially your background) to a colour that's easy to manipulate so that your "selective colour" layers work better!

this alina starkov scene has a relatively blue background with mild splotches of green. the blue is easier to manipulate than green since there's more of it, so i'll move the hue/saturation to the right (+8) to make the gif a little bluer.

step 3: colour balance.

colour balance works the same way — use it to change the colour of your gif so that your selective colour layers are stronger.

play around with midtones, shadows, and highlights. don't overuse these, or it'll be a pain to fix other parts of your gif later (i.e. a person's face). again, i made the gif look more blue and less green with this colour balance layer. this is how my gif looks now, with a before and after included so you see what i meant about going from green -> blue:

*i also added two subtle selective colour layers (set on "relative") after the colour balance to make alina's face less grey.

step 4: selective colour

alright, this is where the real colouring comes in!!! selective colour layers are your best friend when you want vibrant colours in your gif. now that we've made the scene take on a bluer tone than green, click on "selective colour." you’ll see two options when you click on it: absolute and relative.

i recommend beginning with absolute, not relative. absolute is stronger than relative, and will therefore give you more vibrant results. you can use relative to "touch up" later.

the key to selective colour layers is to alternate between absolute and relative. think of the absolute layers as a way to set the foundation for a new colour, and the relative layers as a way to subtly fix little things afterwards. the number of selective colour layers will differ per scene and gif. sometimes, i'll have 5 absolute + 10 relative, and other times i'll have 10 absolute + 2 relative.

there's no right answer for how you play around with the toggles in selective colouring, because again, it will differ per scene.

for this gif, the first thing i did was go to the cyans (absolute) and dragged the toggle for "cyan" all the way to the left (-100), magenta (+8), and yellow (+38). this got rid of the cyan tones, but that's alright, because the point of establishing this blue tone is so that the colour of the entire gif is easier to manipulate.

for blues (absolute), i did the following: cyan (-48), magenta (-27), yellow (+100). this gets rid of the blues almost entirely, leaving us with a light grey and neutral tone.

since we now have this neutral tone, i went to neutrals (absolute), and moved the toggles: cyan (-25), magenta (+10), yellow (+100). i also did black (-5) to make the scene a little brighter. now, after all of this, our background is orangey-yellow. the only problem is that it's also affected alina's face, so our gif looks like this:

definitely not the look we want the final gif to have. but this is alright! don't be afraid to make your scene look intense, because your layer mask will help you!

click on your layer mask — the white box next to the selective colour layer. make sure you click on the layer mask of the selective colour layer that's affected the person's face. so, mine would be the "neutrals" selective colour layer. then, grab the brush tool, set the colour to black, and colour over the face/other necessary areas. anywhere you paint black on your gif, the selective colour layer's effect will be erased. if you make a mistake, change your brush tool colour to white and paint the layer back.

my gif looks much better now, and alina's face is no longer orange. but i want the background to look yellow — this is orange. now that we've established a vibrant colour background, it'll be much easier to work with — getting here was the hardest part!

i made another selective colour (absolute) layer. i usually like to have at least two absolute layers before moving on to relative layers.

now that our background is orangey-yellow, we can dive right into the yellows of our selective colour layer. i moved the toggles like so: cyan (-100), magenta (-9), and yellow (+100). this gives me a light yellow colour, but there are still darker splotches in my gifs. this isn't an issue; i just moved black to -40 and fixed most of it.

now that we have a vibrant colour that's similar to the shade we want, it's time for our relative selective colour layers. my gif looks good, but i want it to take on an even more vibrant shade.

make a new selective colour layer and click relative. the changes you make with relative will be subtler than absolute, but because we've established such a vibrant colour already, relative will be perfect! i moved the toggles like so: cyan (-100), magenta (-33), yellow (+16), black (-6). now my gif looks like this:

this gif turned out pretty good without a lot of trouble, but sometimes, i'll have to go ahead and add another absolute layer, then another relative layer, etc. again, like i said earlier: alternate between absolute and relative selective colour layers!!!!

step 5: new layer + brush tool

i could leave this gif as is, but i still think that the darker splotches ruin the overall look. to fix this issue, i made a new layer, used the eydropper tool to find the right colour, and used the brush tool to colour over these areas. again, i usually have multiple layers where i manually colour over certain areas. for this gif, i have 5 layers.

i tend to set the blending mode to soft light because it gives the best results. colour works too, but i find that it tends to make the colours look a bit flatter.

near the top of alina's head are whiter splotches. those bothered me as well, so again, i made a new layer and used the brush tool to cover them. i didn't change the blending mode though. i kept it on normal but lowered the opacity (for this gif, to 63%). this works because there isn't a lot of movement in the gif, so it doesn't look messy. darken will colour in your white spots too, but that doesn't work too well sometimes — in my opinion, keeping it on normal and messing around with the opacity looks most natural.

this is how my gif looks now:

step 6: curves

now that our colouring is done, it's time for curves!

if you click on the curves layer, you'll see that there are three little droppers on the left. i use the first and the third.

click on the first dropper, then click on the darkest point of your gif. then use the third dropper to click on the whitest part of your gif. this will help balance out the brightness and contrast. if your curves are too extreme, lower the opacity.

if your gif doesn't look good with the curves layers, just scrap them. you can fix most of the brightness with a new selective colour layer. for this gif, i used curves and a new selective colour layer to make alina's hair look darker and less blue. this also helped balance out the overall brightness of the gif, as well as her skin tone.

step 7: vibrance

slap on a vibrance layer, but leave the saturation alone. for this gif, i did vibrance +37.

andddd that's it!

this is what my final gif looks like:

*the area around her neck is a bit too pixelated, but it was fine because this gif was originally used in a 268 px gifset, so it wasn't noticeable.

but this is an issue that can happen with vibrant colouring! so, what if the gif turns out too pixelated after a lot of colour manipulation?

this is an easy fix if your gifset doesn't have a lot of movement (and in some cases, even works with some movement!) here's an example.

this gif was given a vibrant purple colour by doing the steps listed above. i've included a before and after so you can see the colouring.

but if you look near the top, it's very pixelated and messy because of how much brightness/colour manipulation has happened. we can fix this by making a new layer, using the eyedropper tool to find a similar shade of purple to the background, then colouring over those pixelated spots.

keep the blending mode on normal but lower the opacity so that it blends seamlessly. for this gif, 48% opacity worked.

my gif now looks like this:

it's not perfect. if you look closely, you can see that some of the purple is painted over spider-man's head at one point since there's a lot of movement happening here. you can sometimes fix this by using the eraser tool with a significantly lowered opacity (i.e. 15-30%). but the main point is, the pixelated areas look much better and less messy, and overall, the gif has a more cohesive look.

AGAIN, the key idea of vibrant colouring:

the key idea of vibrant colouring is, in my opinion, this: manipulate the overall colour of the gif with other layers so you can use selective colour to achieve your vibrant colours.

one method that i sometimes use (but didn't for the previous examples) is to take your gif, do all of the steps, but focus especially on new layers + brush tool to help you colour your gif. here's what i mean.

this admittedly awkwardly coloured gif of MJ was originally blue. this vibrant blue was achieved by making a new layer and manually colouring in the background after doing all the other steps. it was blue before, but it certainly wasn't this vibrant without the multiple manually-coloured layers. you can see what i mean in the before and after:

since we have this vibrant blue colouring, adding a selective layer on top of this will give us fantastic results. since your gif is blue, go to cyans and blues on a selective colour layer.

with the help of three selective colour layers that alternate between absolute and relative, my final gif looks like this:

if i hadn't used new layer + brush tool to manually colour this gif's background, it wouldn't have ended up so vibrant — or if it had, it would've taken me much longer.

so, again: focus on manipulating the entire background so you can take full advantage of selective colour layers!!! with practice, it gets easier.