#coloring tutorial

I do all my pieces in procreate! Heres all the brushes I currently use. Except the signature brush (which I made myself with a YouTube tutorial) and the oberon brush (which is in the procreate library by default), all of these are by the wonderful fishspencil! I recommend taking a look at their brush sets, they are all free and it’s been a lot of fun experimenting with different techniques!!

Now, as for the coloring, what I do heavily depends on what I’m trying to draw? And the ambience I want to give it! I don’t color backgrounds the same way I do characters; for the sake of this tutorial tho let’s just say we’re trying to color in a character on a blank canvas! Hyacine will be our test subject for today

What I usually start with, is either the skin tone or blocking out the entire shape with either the skin tone or a light color depending on the outcome I want, so it’s easier to make a palette that is aesthetically pleasing(?)and the colors complement each other! I like using earthy colors for the skin so the palette ends up with a warm hue 🙂‍↕️ I like to pick colors from the leftmost part of the coloring wheel, though I think mixing those with saturated hues create the best results!

For shading, I turn the wheel slightly downwards and color pick a tone below where the base color is:

As I color in the different pieces of the character I like to render each, so the next thing can be nicely on top and I don’t need to use the eraser. Specially when drawing a character that has an established design (i.e any canon character such as Hyacine in our case!) I like to take some liberties with their designs shape wise, but also with the colors! Whatever hue of pink hair fits her skin tone the most, thats what we go with

For the render, I do the same things for every part of the character! I tend to separate hair and clothing items into ‘pieces’, shapes I can color later on with a similar tone to the base color to give the piece some flair! I also like being MESSYYYY on the rendering, adding doodled lines and zigzags, here’s a closeup of the himeko nova piece I posted recently where you can appreciate what I mean with both the doodling and the segmented coloring!:

Lastly, I do a color correction phase! I like to play around with the color sliders and different gradient maps to see what will come out! The first four options under the effects icon in procreate are the ones I like to use the most. After that, I like to draw over the character a bit more to give certain parts of their clothing a messier look :D

Shading eyes :

My shading style really isn't complicated at all, it's mainly just color theory stuff ! Don't be afraid to try to mix colors together to create cool palettes !!!

Shading hair :

The hair coloring is very simple and most of it is done using the basic photoshop airbrush ! The tutorial underneath is for my simple pieces with very light rendering :)

I use KMPlayer to get my caps, and for the Sequel Trilogy at least, I broke down and downloaded extremely high quality copies (they're about 8gb per file), but this is not necessary. Many of the files I use for my gifs are anywhere between 2gb to 3gb: they're not always the clearest, but they work and they're not a requirement imo, it's just that I love seeing all the details in the sequels (and for TROS, it's necessary in order to gif the sand burrows sequence).

Once I load my caps into Photoshop, I crop my gif. Photoshop is helpful, where they actually have presets for the dimensions you can use. Any of them will do, but if you're setting out to make a mobile header, you'll want to go with the 16 x 9 setting.

For the sake of this tutorial, I'm sticking with my tried and true 2x3, though. The next thing I do is resize it, Tumblr's width dimensions right now are 540, so I always go with that for the width of my big gifs.

Now, what I've learned is what you choose on the drop down menu, will impact how your gif looks. For a brief period in time, I was using billenial, but I didn't like how it made my gifs look (I think they were coming out fuzzier in a way I disliked), so I always select bicubic (best for smooth gradients).

To me, this tends to make the gif look smoother, anyway, once I've resized it down.

Now, from here I fucking cheat, lmao. I made an action years ago to deal with the technical aspect of animating a gif cos I still get confused by that, so I click that until it goes to the portion where I need to start sharpening my gif:

As you can see, I have a few actions saved for sharpening: it's cos depending on the quality of the file I'm working on, I'll shift how I sharpen it to make sure it doesn't lower the actual quality of the gif. Right now, though, my primary sharpening settings are this:

My first smart sharpening layer:

Then, I have a Gaussian blur layer. Since I don't want the gif to be too blurry, I have lowered the opacity of this layer to ensure it doesn't overwhelm the gif itself:

And then I do one last smart sharpening layer, with these settings:

Now that the sharpening is done, I can move into the coloring stage! The first thing I do is I try to brighten up the image/gently color correct. The easiest way to start this is by using the white point color dropper in the curves layer:

What you'll do is look for the brightest corner of the image, click on it with this tool, and it'll color correct for you. This step involves a lot of trial and error, and sometimes I scrap it altogether and use exposure and channel mixer for more control on the outcome of the coloring.

I clicked on the white walls to the left of Rey, and that worked fairly well in terms of coloring. It's a tad more red leaning than I'd like, so I lowered the opacity of that layer to 74% (I always lower the opacity on the "fill" area rather than the actual opacity, cos I'm curious like that), and then I took the white line in the curves box, which designates the lighting/shadows, and I pulled it down a bit to give it a more natural look.

From there, I always add a levels layer: it's great for adjusting highlights and shadows in my opinion. I always bump up the white pointer until I'm happy with the brightness, and then I lower the black pointer until the gif has the depth I want (but not too much, cos I'll go back and edit it with selective coloring later). Depending on the gif, I might use the grey pointer in the middle, which brightens the overall gif, though it's not super often this is necessary.

Now, Rey's still looking a little too red for my liking, but I like the overall brightness of this gif (so far), so I'm gonna get into the weeds of working on the actual coloring. My first trick is adding a vibrance layer:

Lowering the saturation is a great way to get rid of any orange hues on a characters skin, while vibrance adds a (normal) level of color to their skin and doesn't make them look like a corpse, basically lmfao. I actually learned this trick through this wonderful anti orange-washing tutorial, which if you're giving any characters of color, is critical reading.

So now I move onto selective coloring, this one's a very play at your own leisure thing. I tend to work the most with the Reds, Neutrals, and Blacks, to tweak the coloring to get the result I want. This is what my settings look like so far:

There was some pinkish areas in the canvas (near Rey's hairline, her shoulders, and obviously her mouth) so I went ahead and messed with the magentas as well - selective coloring is probably the most important part of any of my gifs, not only does it help me get the tint that I want (or help me remove any tones that I don't want), it's also my primary tool in avoiding whitewashing, next to the vibrance tool - if I were giffing Poe or Finn, there'd probably be at least two or three additional selective coloring layers to make sure their skin tones were the right shade.

So, right now our Rey gif is looking like this:

Which is honestly fine, but I want the background to be a little less neutral. So I'm adding a channel mix layer, and going to the blues: from what I can tell, the lights behind Rey are a bit greenish in tone, so I'm gonna add more blue to the greens in the image:

Now, this made Rey's face a bit more cool/pink than I want, so I'm gonna add another selective color layer, and add more yellow to the reds:

There's still not as much depth to the gif here as I'd like, so I'm gonna add a little more to the neutrals and blacks:

Honestly, we could stop here, but I want to add a little more brightness to the gif (not much), so I'm gonna add a brightness/contrast layer:

Now that I'm satisfied with how the gif looks, I'm gonna run my action to change the speed the gif plays at to 0.05 (PS automatically sets it to 0.03 which is like watching the scene on fast forward), and our result is this:

And that's my usual process! I've gone through many "style evolutions" across the years with my coloring, so my biggest piece of advice is to just go ham fucking wild. Experiment, figure out what works for you: there was a time where I relied on photo filters to color correct my gifs and I used that for almost two years! Then I moved onto color balance for almost a year, I think, until I quit liking how it looked and I landed on my current method.

My other piece of advice is to look up as many giffing tutorials as you can find. I'm only as familiar with all these tricks because I'm constantly reading other people's tutorials and experimenting with their tips and tricks, blending them together until I find my own rhythm. @usergif has a directory of gif tutorials that I frequent often tbh!

you'll start with a curve layer and this is literally the most important part. you'll want to choose the little white dropper

my cursor is not showing but it's the one with the little box around it. from there you want to find the lightest pixel on this horribly lit scene and pray for a miracle

here was my spot of choice because pickings were slim. and this is the result:

and like, you could totally leave it here if you want but it was just a little too weirdly colored for me so i dimmed the curve layer just a bit to this:

which gave me this

so for comparison:

maybe not a huge difference but i'm very picky with coloring. from there i added a few different adjustment layers. a little contrast, some selective color, a photo filter to give it a little wamrth and voila

i am not perfect at coloring and even the final result still annoys the hell out of me because why the fuck were those scenes so dark but like

1. picking up your clip

first of all, there's two ways you can make a gif, with a video clip and with frames. i do it the video clip way, so you're gonna need something to trim videos with. i'm currently using capcut (it's very intuitive, but if your want some help with that just lmk). some people use vapoursynth, but i find it really intimidating and haven't tried it yet

2. importing to photoshop + picking your frames

okay so now for the gif itself, i use photoshop (no, i don't pay for it 🏴‍☠️ dm me and i can share the link with you)

once you have your video clip ready, you're going to file > import > video frames to layers..., then choosing your file. it'll open this window:

you'll then choose the part of the video you want to gif by toggling the little arrows on the bottom. pick it a little before and after the part you actually want to gif, we'll delete the unwanted parts later

you'll now have something like this:

the timeline below (red) is where you're going to choose which frames you want in our gif. once you pick where you want the gif to start, select the frames before that and delete it. you're gonna have to do the same on the little layers window at the side (blue). if you're not sure until which layer to delete, the one with the little eye is the first frame of your timeline

repeat the same process with the end of your gif. you're gonna want to have something around 70-100 frames if you want it to be inside tumblr's 10mb limit, tho it can vary a lot depending on the size and colors of your gif

after that you're changing the frame delay time (the little time under your frame on the timeline). i have a little hack for that and i'm not sure how most people do it, but my train of thought here is:

if the starting delay is 0,03 -> change to 0,05

if the starting delay is 0,02 -> change to 0,04

if you have around 50-60 frames -> change to 0,06

if you have around 30-40 frames -> change to 0,07

this isn't exact science, you're gonna need to do some trial and error here to see what fits you best. to change the delay, select all the frames > click on the arrow besides the time on one of them > other... > type your delay and hit ok

3. Resizing

now it's time to cut your gif. tumblr has a set width for gifs so they don't look weird when you post. here's a little cheat sheet of the sizes, the height can be changed according to your liking. for this tutorial i'm picking a 540 x 300 ratio

pick the crop tool (C) > enter your prefered ratio > work the tool around the part of your gif you want cropped

4. Coloring

We're halfway done! Now the fun part, coloring~

On your layer window, on top of all the layers create a new folder where you're doing your coloring (red), then click on the adjusment layer icon (blue)

i always start with a curves layer set to auto, it usually already does wonders but you can always adjust it to your liking. do the same with a levels layer

this is the difference with just these first two layers on auto:

sometimes the auto tool will make your gif look weird, so you can just tweak with it to your liking, but most of the time it works really well and saves you a lot of work.

now we're adding an exposure layer. there's three sets on it, exposure i only use on really dark scenes, offset can be used very little to make blacks darker but be careful with it. now the one i really use is the gamma correction. i always use the gamma correction to make the gif a little darker than you'd think it's good because my sharpening making things a lot brighter, so you want to prepare for that

okay so these are the basics for my coloring. you can see that just 3 layers already make the gif look pretty good, but i always like to do some color correcting, so let's get to that

make a hue/saturation layer, we'll start with the master, that usually changes the skin color. here it really depends on the scene, this one isn't as bad so i just added a little saturation and made it less pink. you might also want to change red and yellows, but like i said, really depends on the scene

lastly i'm adding a selective color layer, set on neutrals

and here's the final result of the coloring:

like i said, this part will really depend on your original video, but overall those are the layers i use to color

(oh yeah, i usually copy the folder where the coloring is into a new file when i'm doing a set so i can use the same coloring throughout the set)

5. Sharpening

now that the coloring's done, you're going to sharpen your gif

first of all, you need to convert your work into smart filters. convert to video timeline

go to select > all layers then filters > covert to smart filters. you'll have something like this:

for the sharpening, there's 3 steps:

filter > sharpen > smart sharpen. here are the settings:

filter > sharpen > smart sharpen. now these are a different setting. the radius can be anything between 10 and 20... for shows i usually do 15, but depending on the video the sharpening can look weird, so just lower that and see how it goes

filter > blur > gaussian blur

here's the sharpened gif:

6. Exporting

you're almost done! now we're saving the gif (and hoping for the best)

first off, resize your gif by going on image > image size > then changing the width for tumblr size. make sure the little chain is locked so your gif doesn't end up with a weird shape

now go to file > export > save for web (legacy). make sure your settings look like this:

now i really don't know if this is a me problem or not, or if this even works like this lol but i always go on the little tabs on top, click on original, then back on optimized and you'll see that the size on the bottom will probably change from the one before

here is a little hit and miss, really. the more frames in your gif, the bigger it'll be. if you go to export and the gif is bigger than 10mb, you can always go back and try to trim the gif on the timeline using this tool:

i really don't have a lot of advice here because i'm always struggling with this myself lol i just try to trim it until it's on tumblr size.

back on the export window, after you changed to original then optimized, go back to the original and save it (i really don't know if there's an actual difference between original and optimized but in my head the original always looks more high quality)

and here's our original gif x final gif:

2. Do some soft airbrush coloring on it. (Usually a blush thingy and a soft skin air coloring on the edges of the hair)

3. Do a simple shadow layer. (be mindful of where the light hits tho so it's more comprehensive:)))

4. (These are all in this one multiply layer) Grab the AIRBRUSH, ERASER, a SOFT PAINT, and the BLURRING PEN. Put some airbrush on the shadows (don't do too much tho), just lil dab there and there.

5. Using the blurring pen, smooth SOME of the edges, DON'T blur them all. Basically make some edges soft but also leave some edges hard.

6. Use the ERASER and delete some of the shadows for where the light bounces back (it's okay if it sometimes doesn't make sense) but again,,, don't overdo it, just erase what feels right for you :333

7. Grab a hard pen,,, as for my case, I used a lasso pen for the little details and again,,, don't overdo it. Grab a lighter color for the light part and use a darker color for the shadow part. You can just make lil strokes there and there, just enough to show depth and details.

8. (THIS IS A REALLY LONG PROCESS TO DO)vBalright now grab the soft painting brush, and all the brushes that I mentioned before. Use the soft painting brush for mixing the colors and use the dark/light colors accordingly. Along with that step, do the coloring method that was mentioned before too (the erasing, airbrush, lasso, etc.) u pretty much mix all the techniques,,, this is what we pretty much call the rendering phase or sumthn like that :>>

9. For tweaking some colors, use the alpha lock (THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT as it only goes to where you did the coloring to) and grab the airbrush again. Pick a saturated color closest to the shadow and dab it a lil on the edges (don't do it to everything, it's gonna ruin your render tehee)

as u can see from the image, the color lightened up a bit and also became a lil saturated.

10. Still with the alpha lock, we're going to use a bluish color (this is optional because i used a different color triad, so it's different for everyone) i went with that color bc it's a common one. Same with the step 9, you do the same thing but ONLY do it on the edges (and to wherever you feel like placing it heh)

11. Now, go to the line art layer and enable the alpha lock again. Choose a saturated color closer to the color over it. Use the airbrush, and dab it a little, more specifically on the lighter side. Treat it like another rendering phase, put it accordingly to where it's light and where it's dark.

12. Now do the same thing on other aspects (eyes, lips, clothes, etc.) Go crazy go stupid with it heh