They Are Young Boys, Aren't They?

okay -- since we're just talking about sharpening + coloring, i've already downloaded, prepped, imported as frames into photoshop, and cropped. so now i have a blurry, uncolored gif, converted to a smart object, that's ready to go!

for every gif, my go-to adjustments are:

smart sharpen

levels

selective color

smart sharpen

my sharpen settings are (almost) always the same. i have an automated action saved for it, but if i want to do it manually, i apply the smart sharpen filter twice, both with different settings.

Filters -> Sharpen -> Smart Sharpen. for the first pass, i set the amount to 10% and the radius to 10px.

Filters -> Sharpen -> Smart Sharpen (again). second pass, i crank the amount all the way to 500%. the radius amount on this second filter is where i can sometimes differ. the higher the number here, the crispier the gif, but too high of a number will create halos around edges. generally, my range will be 0.3-0.5px. this is already a really great, hq source clip, and 0.5px looked good to me, so that's what i went with!

and that's it as far as sharpening goes! you can see the difference side-by-side:

levels

okay we're getting into the fun part! my first step when it comes to coloring is using the Levels adjustment tool. i use levels to adjust the tonal ranges of my gif (shadows, midtones, highlights, brightness, contrast). i also use the individual color channels to do light color grading and correcting.

setting the black point and white point

from the adjustments panel, i click Levels. it'll automatically open to the levels histogram in the RGB channel.

on the left of the histogram, the topmost eyedropper tool is for the black point. you can see me select it, then select the darkest part of my gif -- aka, the part of my img i want photoshop to map as black.

the bottom eyedropper tool to the left of the histogram is for setting the white point. it works the same way setting the black point does -- you're selecting what part you want photoshop to map as white.

sometimes i skip this step if i don't think the gif needs it, or i will manually brighten + color correct! it can aggressively overexpose or alter the color balance of the gif if you aren't careful, and not all gifs will or should have pixels that are pure white.

adjusting brightness & contrast

now, still in the RGB channel, i use the markers on the histogram to start adjusting the brightness and contrast of my gif.

left marker: shadows

middle marker: midtones

right marker: highlights

and then i just play around with it until i like it! i like bright gifs; i like contrast.

color correcting & color grading

this is probably not the best example to show how i color correct/grade in the levels tool -- it can get pretty involved, but this source clip was well-lit and professionally shot, so this gif really didn't need much! it was slightly warm for my taste (i like to lean cooler in my coloring) so i did some slight color-correcting in the blue and red channels to neutralize that warmth:

general rule of thumb for the four options in the channel dropdown:

RGB (the "main" channel where you can adjust the overall tonal values of shadows, midtones, and highlights.)

RED (adjust the RED / CYAN balance)

GREEN (adjust the GREEN / MAGENTA balance)

BLUE (adjust the BLUE / YELLOW balance)

when it comes to color correcting, some gifs require more channel-specific attention than others. like, during clay season, the light reflecting off of the clay casts a red/orange tint over everything, so most of the time spent color correcting those gifs are spent in the red and blue channels. wimbledon gifs, because of the grass, were all mostly neutralized in the green channel.

anyway, that's it for levels! here's what my gif looks like at this point after i'm happy with my adjustments:

selective color

even without selective color, it's a good looking gif! but my personal coloring preferences lean more stylized vs realistic, so this is my favorite part of the whole process lol. i thought it'd be funny to try and fit an entire minute-long screen recording into a gif, but it looks like i'm doing a speed run 😭 it's not quite this fast in real time.

you guys know i loveee bright, vivid colors in my gifs. with selective color i can do advanced color grading and target specific color ranges without touching unrelated colors; super helpful when i want my gif to be vivid but i want to avoid altering skintones. you can use selective color to shift a color completely, like change all your greens in your image to blue, or yellow, etc; or you can use it how i use it, where i strengthen the already-existent values to make the colors more intense and vibrant. using the Relative setting (below the sliders), my baseline process for every gif is:***

Blacks: shift/increase the black slider, making the blacks of my gif even darker -- more contrast, plus i think it can trick the eyes and make the gif look sharper. (also, super helpful when trying to control how large your img size is -- more on this at the end).

Neutrals*: don't touch.

Whites: slightly increase the cyan slider, slightly decrease the yellow slider so it leans blue (i like cool-toned whites).

Magentas: i usually bump the magenta slider. this will brighten mouths and lips (verrry subtly with jannik, lol), but i've found it isn't sensitive enough to affect skintones. keep an eye on it, though, especially for someone blushier than jannik.

Blues**: crank the cyan slider almost all the way to the right, and crank the yellow slider almost all the way to the left (blue). i love bright blues.

Cyans**: same as blues -- move the cyan slider all the way to the right, and yellow all the way to the left.

Greens: i hate color-grading green -- if it's in the background you will see me turn it black in a lot of gifs lol. with no proof whatsoever i think it's the most susceptible to noise and grain. anyway, no significant green colors here, so i left it alone.

Yellows*: don't touch.

Reds*: don't touch.

after that, you end up with something like this:

*i would not touch neutrals, yellows, or reds unless you're comfortable using the brush tool with layer masks. adjusting anything here will affect skintones. i will bump reds sometimes to emphasize jannik's hair, but then i use the brush to ensure it only affects his hair.

**with blues specifically, i will sometimes do a second layer of selective color and bump cyans/blues again to make them even brighter. i did that with these gifs.

***while these are my typical selective color settings for every gif, something i keep in mind when considering the output quality is the fact that adjusting these colors too much will exaggerate compression artifacts or emphasize banding/blocking/noise, especially if the original clip isn't super hd, which is the case for most match clips. this gif/clip is hq, so i have more room to play.

AND that's the last step for these gifs!! some gifs require more steps or special attention, but this is a good example of my baseline for coloring/sharpening. original un-sharpened gif vs the final product:

a few final thoughts/tips:

my go-to export settings are adaptive + diffusion, but any combination of adaptive/selective (and sometimes restrictive for LARGE gifs, like these) and diffusion/pattern will look good, it's just based on preference. IF you're interested in examples/the subtleties:

i used selective + pattern here

adaptive + pattern here

selective + diffusion here & here

restrictive + diffusion mentioned above & here

gif size limit on tumblr is 10MB. constantly keeping that in mind while sharpening/coloring because i know i'm working against it, especially when i'm working with really sharp gifs like these. higher quality = img holds more information, more information = larger image size. there are a lot of things that affect image size. it's kind of a balancing act between dimensions, number of frames, amount of motion, number of colors, detail/texture, grain, etc.

something really helpful about setting a black point for your gif and making shadows darker is that black pixels hold much less info, and are much easier to compress, so it helps control file size.