#coloring help

we'll start with a basic gif that's already been cropped and sharpened down below:

the first step i always take with any gif i'm working on is curves. now usually, i use the bright eyedropper and select the lightest part of the gif to brighten it up, but the outcomes weren't to my liking (which is normal). so i took it upon myself to manipulate it myself and came to this:

here are the results after:

now we're no longer in the dark! my next step is to use brightness/contrast which i always have the same input when i use it. even if a gif is already light enough, i think it adds needed dimension which i tend to go for:

and after that layer, we're left with this:

a slight change, but change nonetheless. if you're worried about your gif being too bright, leave this layer out! otherwise, let's keep going.

the next step i use in my colouring is levels. i love using levels for more contrast in darkening. like brightness/contrast, i use the same settings about 99.99% of the time:

after that, this is what the gif is looking like:

brightness/contrast and levels are my main two nonnegotiable layers that i swear by when it comes to any gif, since they're nearly always the same.

next, is color balance. since the skintone is more red than i'd like, i go in with more greens and cyans to help counter the magenta and red hues going on. i use all three channels: shadows, midtones and highlights. like always, it's up to your preference, but i prefer a more cooler tone if i can manage. here are my settings for that:

and this is what we have to work with after:

you can stop here if you're completely satisfied, however i have one more layer that i like to use: selective color. if contrast is what you want, i feel like this layer truly helps deepen the colours that are already present in the gif as well as able to take them away if need be. since her skintone is still on the yellow side, i want to take more of that away, but not so much to where the gif looks dull. below are my settings for how i achieved that:

and here is the final completed gif:

a useful setting would be Selective Color ( i apologize if the name is wrong, i have my photopea in spanish and have to translate everything myself 😓😓)

for example, the PSDs i used here barely have any layers, but i used a ton of selective color layers!

basically, from my own experience, i'll say Selective color is to make a specific color kinda .....pop (?. idk how to explain it.

moving on, i also recommend threshold! idk how to explain this one, so i'll just leave an example!

I exagerated it a little to show the effect properly lol, you can adjust it to as little or as much as you want! just remember to set the layer to multiply! (or any blending mode that works for you! many of them work, i just use multiply for... no reason at all actually)

next up, we have Replace Color!

it literally just... replaces colors. most people use it on black! just add the effect, set the color to the one you wish to replace, and start playing with the settings!

-- also, note that when using it on black, you have to turn up the luminosity for it to work!

last but not least, Color Intensity!

its just... color intensity. but yeah! its pretty useful! i'll leave 2 examples here.

If anyone has any other tips, feel free to reblog! i kind of learned everything by myself, so im not the best, sorry.

i'll confess i haven't seen it myself, but @/canarysage has a psd tutorial here! so... just saying, you should check that out!

(user canarysage feel free to throw tomatoes at me and boo me off the stage (in other words, feel free to send an ask to be removed!))