#coloring methods

1. Cooling Filter (82) 

When something is as warm and red as this, you usually want to counteract with something cooler or the exact opposite. In this case, since the scene is red and yellow, I used a cooling filter which provides a harsher shade of blue than the deep blue filter. If the scene were more red and magenta, I might use a deep green filter to help naturalize some of those highlights, but this is not the case. The cooling filter does dull the image down but makes the skin tone look more natural. 

As you can see from the original in comparison to the filter: 

That filter alone has already taken away some of the yellow and red, making her skin tone far more natural. 

2. Exposure

Now, I love curves. Pinpointing the whites and blacks of a gif with curves can be immensely helpful and a quick way to get what you want, but sometimes it does mess up the colors and it can lead you to doing more work to fix those colors. Sometimes, you just gotta go with exposure to help brighten it up. 

This helps a lot and after this I always go to color balance because then I can really emphasize those highlights on her face and wash out a lot of that remaining red and yellow. 

3. Color Balance

When it comes to a scene as warm as this one, I immediately go to the highlights where I majorly bump up the cyan and the blue. After I do that I go to adjust the shadows, where I use a little red just to darken the shadows and make sure her skin doesn’t turn blue. I, personally, always save midtones for last. I like to emphasize the highlights and naturalize the shadows as much as I can before going to the midtones to fix the skin color. 

4. Selective Color

With selective color, I always like to go to my neutrals and lighten up those blacks. I find it softens the colors a little and helps the quality when adding and subtracting colors sometimes. So for this gif, I brightened it up with the neutrals, added a little bit more red to it, but took some yellow out as well as brightening it up there to add a little more highlights. I also added a lot of yellow under magenta to help erase some of the pink and help it match the rest of her face.

5. Color Balance 

In this case, I still wasn’t quite happy with where the gif was. I’m a huge fan of contrast so I wanted the highlights to be brighter. I went back to the cyans and blues under highlights and bumped them again, consequently I had to go back to the shadows and make sure they stayed as dark as I wanted them to. 

6. Levels

Now we are in the final steps. I’m finally happy with the colors of her face and I can switch over to making her face brighter. I brighten up those highlights but I also play around around with those grays. Like the neutrals in selective color, I find it still helps brighten the gif without messing up the colors too much.

7. Curves

As I said early, I love contrast, especially in my gifs. One last time, I brought the brightness up and brought the rest down a bit to darken those shadows.