#*psd

Here are the psds included in this pack!

Power bright + dark scenes psd

The Boys bright + dark scenes psd

The Lost Boys

Jawbreaker

Strange Darling

okay so, when it comes to making gifs and coloring in general, good source material is key. bright and clear videos make the coloring process SO much easier.

i picked an old 2010 wicked oberhausen boot for this tutorial. it doesn't have the highest resolution but the colors translate nicely and the lighting is pretty good as well.

now, this is our base gif cropped and sharpened. i usually want my gifs to look as natural and as close to their base version as possible with just colors and contrast enhanced slightly. baby steps are important here!

first thing i do is add a brightness/contrast layer. these are my settings for this gif:

i rarely ever go above 20 with either brightness or contrast. adding too much early on will make your gif look grainy in the end. our gif now looks like this:

not much has changed but a little goes a long way, trust me. next up is a curves layer. i click the little arrow to open the drop down menu and select increase contrast (rgb). afterwards i reduce the opacity. for this gif i set it to 52%.

this will darken the gif again but it also gets rid of these white spots on elphaba's dress which is great.

next, we start playing around with colors. i usually use 3 color fill and one or two selective color layers. this really is just playing around until you find the settings that you think look good. for this gif i wanted to enhance the green and neutralise some of the yellow, so i went with two color fill layers first.

green to slightly enhance the green of elphie's skin and blue to neutralise the yellow in glinda's hair.

next we're going with a selective color layer. think of the colors you want to pop. for this gif the obvious choices are elphie's skin and glinda's dress.

i added a second layer to further adjust the greens

and ended up with this gif

i then added another color fill layer, set it to multiply and reduced the opacity to 12

followed by a color balance layer

the purpose of these layers is to slightly "cool down" the gif, meaning they decrease orange/yellow undertones while enhancing the blue and purple ones.

next up is a levels layer to add a tiny bit more brightness

followed by a vibrance layer to make existing colors pop

and another curves layer for more brightness/contrast with the opacity set to 50%

our gif now looks like this:

almost done! we're finishing up with a black and white gradient map layer for some more depth

and a cooling filter to further reduce the yellow/orange tones of glinda's face and hair

and that's it!

so, here you go. this is my coloring process most of the time. sometimes i add more layers (on top or in between), other times i use less, it all depends on the specific scene and the mood i'm in lol.

now, could you leave out some of these steps? yeah, definitely. some layers probably don't even make that much of a difference but i like adding them anyway.