#**resources

1. Make the gif like you normally would

Apply coloring, sharpen and other stuff you would normally do to your gifs. Converted it to a Video Timeline and your layers into a Smart Object in your gif making process, let’s proceed.

2. Adjustment Layer ➜ Gradient Map

Before creating a gradient map adjustment layer, make sure you’ve made your two color squares on the left side of your screen the colors you want.

Make sure black is the color above and the color you want the gif to mostly be is the one on the bottom. If black is on the bottom, it’ll show an inverted image.

3. Erase, Erase, Erase

Drag the playhead at the start of the gif. With the gradient map having already a layer mask, select the layer mask and erase the parts of the gif you want to have the natural colors. Some gif makers involve the whole body, but I’m satisfied with erasing only the face.

4. Easy loading

Deactivate your smart filters so that it won’t take long to load the whole gifset and you’ll be able to freely move the playhead.

Next thing you’ll do is unlink the layer mask from the gradient map in order to freely move the layer mask without disturbing the whole layer. You can do that by clicking the chain between the icon of the gradient map and the layer mask.

5. Moving the layer mask

On your video timeline, scroll down to gradient map and click on the arrow beside it.

After selecting, you’ll be able to see an option called “Layer Mask Position”. Click on the clock on the left side to activate keyframes on the layer mask. This is very important.

6. Tracking the movements

Turn off auto-select. Making sure you’ve selected the layer mask on instead of the gradient map itself. Move the playhead and whenever the face is moving outside the erased parts, drag the LAYER MASK to follow the head. If you are unable to turn off auto-select, you can just move the layer mask using your keyboard’s arrow keys, once again make sure you are moving the layer mask and not the gradient map.

AND VOILA YOU’RE DONE!

Just make sure you activated your smart filters again before saving your gif.

[OPTIONAL] HAZY LOOK

Above the gradient map adjustment layer, create a new layer and set it on SCREEN.

Using the same color on the gradient map, select the gradient tool.

When you’re satisfied with the look of the gradient, duplicate the layer, set the duplicated layer to overlay and decrease the opacity to 10% - 30%.

From this:

To this:

I want to start off by saying that there are several ways to do this, everyone has their style. This is just the way I gif and colour to fit my “minimalist” aesthetic. There are several tutorials on how to colour BIPOC, this is simply the way that I do it and this is the way I coloured my Chidi Anagonye gifset.

To begin, I chose a scene with a solid background around the the character I’m giffing. For this example I have chosen this scene from season 1 episode 2.

Start the way you usually do, I usually start off my changing the speed of the gif, crop it, and sharpen it. Once that is done that Ie start to colour the gif.

I have a base .psd that I always start off with, and edit from there. In my base I have used colour balance, curves, selective colour, hue/saturation and brightness/contrast to make it lighter. I added these steps a few times to achieve my starting point. With the base .psd it looks like this.

As you can see, the colour of Chidi’s skin is washed out and a bit ashy. Now I’m going to go in and add selective colour under/before the steps we’ve taken. I add the selective colour here, under my base .psd

Here, I darken the red and the yellow, I play around a bit so it won’t look grainy and will be true to the colour of Chidi’s skin. Once I’ve done it a few times, I darken the last selective colour with some black so that his hair is the right colour. Now the steps look like this (this differs depending on the scene where you might need to add more selective colour or less)

Now that we have taken these steps, the gif looks something like this.

Now you can keep it like this. But I want the background to be lighter, almost white, and for only Chidi to be visible in the gif. So in order to do this I once again add selective colour, but this time over/after my base .psd. Like this:

Here I start by making the white selective colour brighter, I usually do it a little every time so that it won’t get too grainy or change Chidi’s appearance. You can do this as many times as you want to reach the brightness of white that you want. Once I’ve added the white selective colour a few times, I check to see if the colour of Chidi’s skin isn’t washed out, if it is just go back to the selective colour under/before the base .psd in this image and darken the red and yellow more. Now the adjustments look something like this

I know it might look a bit much selective colour, but this is just the way that I do it. Now the gif will look something like this.

The last step (for me) is to remove the door and Eleanor from the gif and make the entire background solid. To do that I add a new layer, I click on this icon at the bottom of the adjustments bar

Now that I have a new layer over/after all my other layers here

Now that the new layer is added, I click the eyedropper tool in the sidebar (this icon)

With the eyedropper I click on the solid background around Chidi so that when I go in to colour the gif, the colours will match so that the background looks like one colour. Then I go in with the brush tool (this icon)

And now I start to colour all the areas that I want to cover in order to make the gif have a solid background. Just make sure you don’t brush the colour over Chidi. Once I’ve coloured all the parts of the gifs that I want, I double check so that the colour of Chidi’s skin is accurate and the gif should look something like this.

Voilà! We’re done!