#cath tutorial

After I got an ask about coloring tip, I decided to do a tutorial on the 101 must know knowledge of coloring. We will go deeper in other tutorial but here are things a beginner should learn to play with: 

In red are the filters you will want to look and play with in order to have basic coloring effect on your gifs. For my part curves and levels are used rarely and i will cover the when and why in another tutorial.

1- Brightness

Always start with the lightning of your gif, as you can see, it impact the color already. If you do the brightness at the end, some of the color set up you have played with my look awful due to the change of light!

2- Exposure

If brightness play with the light found in your gif, exposure will put light all over. It can be a deadly combo but, when done nicely, you can end up with a clearer picture.. sadly there is no magic wand trick to know what looks good, its a lot of playing with the contrast and light.

3- Vibrance

Now, this is where you will enhance the color and put them from being normal to BAM IN YOUR FACE. Let’s take the tree on the left side, if you look the two gifs before, the green looks nice yet a bit faded. With vibrance, it looks greener and lusher. Same for the water.

 But be warned, sometime vibrance will show a tint into the picture that you didn’t notice, per example the skin can look more yellow or red, there will be one random blue spot on a surface where there was none before.... but this is where number four happen

4- Selective color

Selective color makes wonder when you want to tone down a color or enhance it. That is where you can correct some unwanted color vibrance makes pop. Playing with the neutrals and whites are always a good beginner choice and, the better you become, the more you can go select a specific color. Let say for this one, I wanted my green to contrast well with blue. So I went in neutral and made sure that the blues were boosted up, removed the yellow tint it created and then went to the panel green where I played with it until I like the color of my tree

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If you play with those four filters, you will become more comfortable with it and will become better at coloring. Make sure to keep an eye to not oversaturate and create a pixelated effect but this, sadly, is only with practice that you discover how. 

DISCLAIMER: This is how I do it. There is several ways to do it, but i have been using it for over a year and never had a problem 

Get Shortcut

Here is a wonderful editing program call Shortcut, it is free to download and I never got a problem with it except that it might crash if you do heavy editing in videos (which we won't do) or you ask the program to do too many things at once. 

Download here: https://shotcut.org/download/

Open the video you want to get a frame from

It’s rather easy, you click on “open file” and you choose the video you want

Go to the moment you want to frame

Once you have the frame you want to keep, go to file - export to frame- save

Tada! 

You have the frame! If you want to edit them (which I do with all my edits) I take photoshop and play with it

1. Go on the website

 There are several websites to get a font but a free and easy one to use is www.dafont.com . In this tutorial, we will use it, but the steps are the same for another font website. 

2. Find the font you like and download it

3. find the .ttf

there might be more than one because the font has an italic or bold version. get them all they will be automatically compressed by your computer under one font with different aspects. a simple double click works. 

4. click on the install button

5.Tada! It is that simple! 

Tumblr has its own set of rules and quirk that many editors learn as they go but here a small compilation of things that are, in my humble opinion, basic knowledge anyone should have

1- The Size

Depending on the number of gifs/edits you put in a line (with a max of 3), the size of the gif will be different. If you want a quality image, make sure to have at a minimum the right size. 

Here is a chart of the different type of size possible. 

Let say I put an image of 200 in a gifset for 245px, the website automatically stretches it the right amount, creating graininess in the picture and thus rending a lower quality. 

2- The Weight

Mostly important for gifs. Remember this number: 3MB. If you post a gif higher than 3mb the website will not read it and will produce a still image. Even if its 3.001 MB it will not work! 

There are ways to lower the weight of a gif such as the number of frames and number of layers added, but this will be another tutorial on its own. 

3-  The Colors

Coloring is a bitch. There are 100000 ways to do it and the more you start to notice it, the more you notice artist preferences and signatures. There will be a lot tutorial coming but I wanted to mention something simple yet really useful

The Wheel of color

I hear the groans of art students in the backs but not everyone knows about it and I refer to it at least once a day. I won't go into the deep detail but remember this: the opposite of the color is it's complimentary.

Meaning that they go well together; If one of your gifs have a lot of yellow and you want to put something over it that will pop, make it purple!

But also in cancel! The best example I can use is with the show The Magicians where god knows they adore put blue filter everywhere.So I canceled it with shades of orange and yellow until it becomes what I want. Here an example:

 Another tip: since I knew I would have to cancel a shitload of blue as I am a Magicians blog, I created a blue elimination PSD that I apply when needed, so I don’t spend a half hour every time I need blue to go away

4- Font

There will be a tutorial about a text on gifs and other things, but I just wanted to give two websites that are my bible and go to everytime I deal with fonts. 

dafont.com  which is a place you can get any kinds of font and are easy to install on your computer. It’s free and updates regularly!