as in, officially?

We're going to start with our cropped and sharpened gif.

We definitely need to brighten the image first. You can do this in a number of ways, but I usually start with the exact same steps for every single gif I make.

First, I add an exposure layer. There are 3 sliders, and for this layer, we are just going to focus on the top slider, "exposure." If you move the slider to the right, the image gets brighter. Left makes it darker. If you pull it too far to the right, the highlights start to get blown out.

Here are my settings:

Next, I do a curves layer. This layer will both brighten, and also color correct. Using the white point and black point on a curves layer can really do a lot of heavy lifting when color correcting.

Add a new curves layer and click on the the white point dropper (the bottom one). Now you want to click on a part of your gif that is supposed to be white. I usually zoom in on the brightest part of the gif and click on one of the lightest pixels. For this gif, since it's very red/yellow, i zoomed in on Ilya's thumb and chose a light pixel that was more red/yellow. This will add more cyan/blue. (Usually, I will do the same with the black point dropper, clicking on one of the darkest pixels, but that wasn't necessary with this particular gif.)

Next, I added a 2nd Exposure layer. On this layer, I focused on the bottom two sliders. I dragged the gamma correction slider to the left to lighten the gif a bit more, and then the offset very very slightly to the left to add back a bit of contrast.

Here are my settings:

This still wasn't quite bright enough for me, so I added a Levels layer. The levels histogram has 3 points that you can manipulate. Dragging the far right point brightens the gif while maintaining the contrast, the middle point brightens or darkens the midtones, depending on which way you move it. (This will affect the contrast). The left point will darken the gif.

Here are my settings:

Now I wanted to brighten some more and add a bit more contrast, so I added a Brightness/Contrast layer. These sliders are a bit self explanatory.

Here are my settings:

I'm happy with the brightness, so now it's time to get working on the color correction.

First, I added a color balance layer. The color balance layer has 3 different tabs: Highlights, Midtones, and Shadows. In each tab, you can manipulate the colors individually.

For gifs that are overly warm and need a bit of coolness added, I start with the Highlights & Shadows tabs. In both of these tabs, I slide the top slider to the left to add more cyan and the bottom slider to the right to add more blue. Then I go to the midtones and do the opposite to add a tiny bit of warmth back in. (For this particular gif, adding too much cyan/blue really made the coloring look unnatural, so I didn't go too far. The difference is very subtle. For some gifs you can manipulate the colors much more.)

Now for the real star of this show, a photo filter layer. Photo filters can be your best friend when color correcting, although they don't always work. Thankfully, it worked really well here.

I chose one of the cooling filters. Sometimes you might have to lower the opacity, but in this case I just left it at 100.

Look at that difference! Next I wanted to tweak their skintones and lighten the gif a tad bit more. For this, I added a selective color layer.

Selective color depends entirely on each individual gif, so I don't think it's very helpful to give my exact settings, but here is the general idea:

In the red channel, I added a tiny bit of cyan, blue, and black. In the yellow channel, I added quite a bit of red, a little bit of yellow, and some white. In the black & neutral channels I added some white to lighten everything.

I'm very happy with the the coloring now, but I wanted to add a little more contrast. For most of my gifs I add a black & white gradient map set to soft light and lower the opacity. For this gif I lowered it to 42%.

And that's it!