I meant surface blur for anime gifs. I used to use it for TV shows gifs but after seeing the difference without it I stopped using it. Also could you please explain to me what's the difference between these types of blurs you mentioned and on what you use them. I truly fancy your experience.
If by TV shows you mean live action shows then yes you shouldn’t use surface blur for that, it’s not the right type of blur. But surface blur for anime is pretty useful, for example…
this is without surface blur, as you can see its not bad obviously but you can see grain on her shirt and his hair.. while it might look alright now when you go to save those will make your gif look very textured and it creates more colours in your gif so its harder to get gifs to look clean
this is with surface blur, as you can see her shirt clears up quite a bit and howl’s hair too, even though howl’s hair isn’t fully clean it’s an improvement over the last pic and those extra colours that were on his hair and her shirt have now blended to either 1 colour like her shirt or 2 colours like his hair.
of course this is before the gif is even coloured so you try fix it a bit more with your colouring like this (i just threw any colouring on and tweaked it a bit)
there you go, its much less noticeable now and you can usually get it cleaner if you keep tweaking the colouring. Also when you go to save, since the artefacts aren’t too noticeable photoshop sometimes just takes them out completely because it wants to save some colours for other parts of the gif so theres another bonus to adding surface blur and not to mention it brings the gif filesize down too (sometimes a lot)
Obviously there are times when you won’t need it at all, but most likely when you torrent anime there will always be some sort of banding or artefacts that are hard to remove and thats why surface blur helps a lot when giffing.
Here I saved the gifs with and without surface blur
this is without, not too bad but the grain is quite noticeable in some areas like the face the hair the shirts etc
here it is with blur, the difference is immense, almost everything is much cleaner and all i did was add surface blur filter after sharpening, radius 3 and threshold 4
so yeah surface blur helps quite a bit for anime gifs and honestly it just looks much better with it. Hope that helps, I dont really want to get into the other ones since im a bit tired but if you google them you should find out what they are and how they work
