Babygirl bitch 🎀

1. CURVES

I always start with a curves layer and I use the first and third droppers. The first dropper adjusts the dark parts of your scene, so you'll click on the darkest spot of your gif (the closest that spot is to black the better.) The third dropper adjusts the light parts of your gif, but instead of clicking on the lightest spot of the gif, I prefer to click on the lightest spot in the character's face. This is how my layer looks like in that Luke gif:

This method doesn't work on all scenes, so sometimes I adjust it manually. Some scenes are hard to colour with the droppers (for example, scenes with neon lights) and in those cases I just click on ‘Auto’ to bring brightness to the scenes, without drastically changing the colours.

2. BASE PSD

After I have my curves layer I always follow the same method: Brightness, Levels, Color Balance, Selective Color, Curves and Vibrance. You'll probably have to adjust them depending on your scene, but the truth is that my settings are always very similar:

1. Brightness: Between 15-30 / Contrast: Between 5-15 (this will depend on your scene, if it’s dark I usually go with 30/15, but if it isn’t then 15/5 should work just fine.)

2. Levels: 10 / 1.00 / 245

3. Color Balance: This is the layer which will need more adjustment depending on the scene. That Luke scene has a plain background, and since I wanted to make it blue I edited this layer like this (Shadows: -0, 0, -12 / Midtones: -16, 0, +20 / Highlights: -14 / -5 / +13). 

4.1. Selective Colour (reds & yellows): This layer is so important to make the colours look natural. The Reds and Yellows which will affect your character's skin tone. In this scene as you can see Luke’s face is a little bit red, so I used this layer to fix that (x x). For most shows/movies I’ve found that the problem is actually the opposite and the character’s skin is way too pale (it’s just that this scene has great lightning lol). To fix that I edit only the Reds by increasing the Cyan, Magenta AND Yellow until I’m happy with the result.

4.2. Selective Colour: Magenta (x), cyan (x) and blue (x). Sometimes, I also edit the black (like this: Black: +5/+10), but in this case it wasn’t necessary.

5. Curves: I just click 'Auto' to make the gif more bright. Sometimes, if the scene I'm working with is too dark instead of Curves I add another Brightness/Contrast layer or I use an Exposure layer.

6. Vibrance: Between 30-50 / Saturation: Between 5-20 (this depends on the scene too, because if you add too much saturation your character's face will most likely look yellow :/)

Obviously, these exact settings won't always work, so you'll have to play a little with them. My advise is that if your coloring doesn't look right, edit the Brightness/Contrast, Color Balance and Selective Colour (the red, mostly) layers.

3. BACKGROUND

As I said this Luke scene already had great lightning. After all the adjustments I made before the only thing I had to do to bring out the Cyan was adding another Selective Colour layer and edit the Cyan (x) and Blue (x).

But, let's be real, most of the time this isn't the case. I’m going to use this Han Solo gif as an example:

This is how it looks like after using the previous method. It looks pretty and bright, but I want the background to look more blue. I use different methods to make colourful gifs, but lately the one I've been using the most are Gradient Layers. So you’ll click on Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map. I choose these colours (2776ec and 001dfa) and set the Gradient Map to ‘Overlay’ (depending on the scene I use overlay, soft light or colour.) Now my gif looks like this:

This is a scene with very little movement, so to fix Han I’m going to add a Layer Mask in the Gradient Map and paint with black all over him (if you’r not familiar with Layer Mask check this and this, they’re a life saver if you’re making colourful gifsets!) My Layer Mask now looks like this. And this is the final result:

Obviously with gifs with more movement this will be more complicated, but I usually don’t mind if the blending isn’t perfect.