#basic coloring

First things first in order to do this, you should have some basic photoshop knowledge. so before you start it should just plainly look like this:

1) I always start off by getting the brightness of my gif the way that I want. 

it depends on what the scene’s original brightness is as to how you’ll adjust it to get it the way you want, so play around with it! but when I color I always start with a brightness and contrast layer. 

I typically bring down the contrast and bring up the basic brightness. so goes from this:

to this:

then I’ll add a levels adjustment layer:

so now I have this:

then I add a curves adjustment layer:

now it’s this:

then i add more levels:

so that’s all my brightness and it’ll look like this:

2) vibrancy and color. for this step first I amp the vibrance.

again it depends on the scene your coloring but typically when I’m adding vibrance to a brighter scene I end up going over 60.

for this scene I did these adjustments and it looks like:

then sometimes I’ll add an additional vibrance layer if I want more color:

but again this all depends on the scene your coloring. so if the scene is really yellow or blue sometimes adding more vibrance won’t be the best course. so mess around with it and see what you get!

after vibrance I’ll typically add a selective color adjustment layer in which I use accordingly.

if the scene is really yellow, I will take down the yellows. if i think it’s not yellow enough I’ll add to the yellows! if you don’t know how selective color works exactly or you want to know about more that you can do with it I will make another tutorial if requested.

but here’s what I did for this scene:

now it looks like this:

3) I end with adding one more brightness and contrast layer to this with these settings for a final touch:

4) crop, sharpen, and save!