#fyeahps

first thing I do is pick a scene with minimal movement because those are the easiest to color using this method, also through trial and error, I have found out that dark backgrounds in scenes (mainly black) don’t work that well to reflect the color of choice, but brighter backgrounds work better

for this tutorial, I will be using this gif and turning the background blue:

after cropping, resizing, sharpening and coloring, create a new layer set to color

pick the color you want to use and use a brush with a low opacity to color around the character (don’t worry if it’s messy, we’ll fix that later with a mask)

next, duplicate the layer with the color twice and set the very top layer to either darken or multiply (see which one looks best for you) and then group the three layers

create a mask for the group and make sure its set to black and start going over the parts where the color overlaps with the character (you can switch to white to color areas back in)

for this gif, I lowered the opacity of the layer set to darken to 58% but this is a personal preference 

if there are frames towards the beginning or end that slip out of the colored area, I usually delete those and make sure its as smooth as possible 

and this is the final gif:

step one: create your base gif

as always before you can start any gifset, you need to pick what scenes you want. i often pick several different moments and experiment with what works best, some scenes will just perfectly meld together while others will be trickier.

you want to firstly select a ‘base gif’, this is the gif that you’re going to layer your other scenes onto. it’s helpful to have a gif where you can identify a darker area where scenes might be able to be blended onto. silhouettes, side-profiles and shots where you can see a portion of the body are an ideal place to start, but you can use any scene where there is a darker area in contrast to the rest. 

for example, i picked this shot as my ‘base’:

in this shot, there are darker areas which standout, her body particularly below the shoulders but also in her hair. this provides a great ‘base’ for holding other scenes.

i’m going to colour my base gif in the way i usually would (i'm not going to go into details here, but if you want to know how i colour my gifs i have a tutorial here) but making an effort to ensure the blacks are thoroughly darkened (you can do this by adding a selective colours > black layer) and i’m done with my base gif:

step two: create your overlaying gif

next, you want to create your overlaying gif. personally i try to avoid using very light scenes as these can take a lot more work to blend in. if this is your first time blending i’d definitely recommend using a scene with a neutral backdrop, or even more ideally a dark backdrop, as this will just more seamlessly work with your base gif.

so, i’ve picked my first overlay scene as the mountain pathway, this will add a bit of texture to my gif and is fairly ‘neutral’ so should blend in well. i’m going to size and colour this as a separate gif with the same purple tones, then create a new folder (see red circle in screenshot) and drag my entire gif into it:

then i’m going to add a vector mask, to do this make sure you’ve selected the group and press this button highlighted in the screenshot:

step three: blending your gifs

now you’re ready to blend! from here, you want to just drag and drop your overlaying gif folder on top of the base gif, then set your overlaying gif folder to ‘screen’ or ‘lighten’ (i usually use screen, but sometimes lighten depending on the scenes - see what looks best!). it now looks like this:

the obvious issue here is that the overlay has taken over her face. so, we’re going to select that vector mask we added to the ‘overlaying gif’ folder, grab a black paint brush, and just brush over her face. this will remove the overlay from that area. 

i use quite a large soft brush for this (around 200px), the larger you use the ‘smoother’ the transition you’ll get. the smaller the brush the harsher your transition will be. this is the part that takes practice, but the beauty of using a vector mask is that you can grab the eraser tool and erase any of the paint strokes you’ve just done to bring the overlay back. by the end my canvas and layer mask look like this:

from this we can see i’ve blocked out the overlay from the ‘top’ of the gif and concentrated it so it just spreads over her shoulders. this captures the overlay in the space i outlined on the base gif as my ‘blending space’ earlier. i’ve also blacked out the overlay on the right hand side as i want to put another gif in this space. at this point the gif is looking like this:

i think my ‘top tip’ with blending is to leave little details to make the transition between the two gifs more natural. for example, you can see there are still patches of the mountain moving up her neck. i could black these out so the mountain scene is just confined to her body, but in leaving it there is creates more of a transition. these little background details of the scene you’re overlaying can really add to the overall texture of your base gif, and for that reason don’t get too hung up on the ‘details’ of making sure your gif is limited to an exact space. 

optional step four: adding more overlay gifs

for this gif i also added the dragon on the right hand side. you don’t have to be limited to overlaying two scenes and in fact, sometimes a nice idea is to use a more ‘landscape’ shot to add texture to your blended gif. to add more, i repeated step two to colour the shot i wanted, dragged this in its own folder on top of all my other blended gifs and set it to screen again:

i repeated the same steps in step three to black out the background, particularly concentrating in removing the line that we can see where the shot finishes. because in this shot the dragon’s head is actually partially cut off by the top, i was very careful with positioning this overlay and used a smaller black brush above the head. this positioning allowed it to look as if the overlay was giving way to yennefer’s face, rather than the shot cutting it off:

and that’s it, i’m done with my gif! this was a nice straightforward blend, but some scenes may not work as easily, which is where we turn to...

step five: using a black paint layer to create overlay space

sometimes your gif doesn’t have an easily blend-able space. maybe the character is wearing something patterned, or the area just isn’t dark enough. for example in this gif, i’ve done all the above sets but the overlay scene doesn’t stand out very well because the armour pattern gets in the way:

but we can fix this quite simply with our black paintbrush. i go back to my ‘base’ gif and under all the colouring create a new layer and with a large soft paintbrush, paint over the armour. i then set this layer to ‘soft light’. then i create another new layer and using a more medium-sized paintbrush, paint exactly behind where the figures are moving. this layer adds black behind the figures so they stand out more clearly, while the soft light layer aids the transition as it darkens the whole area. now we have this:

this has made the overlay a lot more visible. you can use this technique to pretty much darken any layer. i always try and darken the section i want using ‘soft light’ layers as this creates a smoother transition than you’d achieve by just jumping in with your normal black paintbrush layer, but remember you can use multiple layers to reach the effect you want.

this can be taken to the next step to literally blacken out one side of a gif (and it may be useful if you want to do more side-by-side blending scenes), starting with your normal base gif coloured (admittedly mess-ily):

to completely darkening the right-hand side of it using a few black paintbrushed soft light layers:

and overlaying another gif into this darkened patch:

i’ve even used this technique for light scenes with success, it just might take a bit more practice and you’re better off starting with scenes that naturally have a darker background if you are a blending beginner.

the end!

For this gif, you'll need to work with two psd files: one of your silhouette layer, and one of your ‘base’ layer.

STEP 1 is your silhouette. I used a neat animation from the CATWS credits. 

Basic gif creation: load layers, convert to frame animation, convert to smart object. The usual drill.

Editing the gif: Thankfully in this gif I only want to edit out his name. In other gifs this might require more work, such as editing frame by frame 😬

- I’d also recommend an adjustment of brightness/contrast set at 100+/100+ to have a complete black+white silhouette. I left mine with an off-white colour rather than #FFFFFFF, but as long as it’s an image of only two contrasting colours.

Flatten the gif: After all your editing etc, you’ll want the entire image to be made into a single layer - this makes things easier later on, instead of having multiple layers in a folder.

- Select: all layers, then Filter: convert for smart filters all the adjustment layers etc are gone, and you’re left with a single smart object layer of your silhouette animation 

STEP 2: Now I’m going to work on the base layer, which is the clip of the Valkyrie jet flying through the clouds

Basic gif creation: load layers etc and get your smart object

Editing for adjustments: I have a simple curves, photo filter, and a rather strong colour balance adjustment to aim for the colour theme of my gifset, which is yellow. The more this gif comprises of a single colour, the more colour contrast the end result will be. A base gif that is very greyscale will end up looking equally as greyscale with the overlay, while a richly coloured gif will look very vibrant. If you’re unsure about this, wait til you add the silhouette overlay and experiment later. 

STEP 3: With the base layer done, I will now begin to overlay with the silhouette.

Duplicate the silhouette single layer from the first psd to your base psd

Change the blending of the silhouette layer to EXCLUSION. Difference works too I think? This gives the colour contrast with the black and the white.

Trim and adjust the size/timing/etc to your liking. It’s important you trim the gif so that both the base and the silhouette gif are both visible in the timeframe. In the screencap below, the silhouette is shorter than the base gif so I’ve trimmed the gif to fit it all in.

9. Adjustments on top of the overlay gif layer: This is all to enhance the contrast between the base gif and the silhouette. I used adjustment layers of brightness/contrast, hue/saturation, vibrance and selective colour. My aim was for similar hues to the other colours of the entire gifset. You can also experiment with the first group adjustments.

10. Add text:  - I wanted a font similar to the original credits text, so I chose Acumin Variable Concept, Extra condensed semibold, and eyedropped a colour from the gif

- The text layer blending is set to Colour Dodge (Screen works too, but I preferred the textures of Colour Dodge) - I placed the text layer under the second adjustment layers.. Idk it looked nice.

- I also wanted a fade in similar to the original, so I dragged a fade to the text layer. I had to go back and forth to make sure it lined up nicely with the entire animation.

11. Export for web / save gif - my final file dimensions are 540x360 pixels and 119 frames - GIF settings at adaptive + diffusion, and I cheated with dither 99% (I figured it's a silhouette animation so mehhhhhh I can get away with it) + bicubic smoother quality - I ended up with 9.563mb

Disclaimer: I’m no pro at editing and I’m still learning and experimenting, I honestly don’t know wtf I’m doing in Photoshop most of the time! I just mash away until something works 😂

Step 1 (This is the most important step!): Make your gif. BUT what’s really important is that you chose a scene that is very bright/lightly colored, one that has a lot of natural light and/or the subject is in a very open area. If you tried to make a super dark scene pastel, it’ll look unnatural/low quality because you’re trying to force light colors into a dark scene. So chose a scene that has lots of natural light!

Step 2: Now that you’ve created your basic gif, it’s time for coloring! I used a basic curves layer where I used the white point tool to select the whitest point of the gif (in this case, the top left hand corner), a levels layer to enhance the contrast and lighten the whiter parts, and a color balance layer to make Jyn’s face less dull. There are a lot of ways you can experiment with this but I like to make the coloring as natural as possible.

Step 3: After your gif is colored, create a new blank layer and set it to overlay. Then take your paintbrush tool and use the eyedropper tool to pick the color you want most prominently featured in your gif. Since I was going for a pink/purple scheme, I chose a shade of pink. Then, with a very large, soft brush, I carefully painted the background with the pink, adding some on her clothes and hair to make it look more smooth. 

I then used another levels layer to increase the contrast and lighten the background. Then, I added a selective color layer and set the magentas in cyan to +100, and set a vibrance layer as a clipping mask to that selective color layer and increased the vibrance by +36

Then I used a vibrance layer to massively increase the vibrance and saturation of the pastel colors. 

Note how Jyn’s face is really red here? I didn’t like that, so I used a selective color layer and increased the cyans in the red.

There, much better. Technically you can stop here if you want, but if you want to go further, I added a saturation layer set to magentas and increased the saturation of magentas to make the purple pop out even more. I also painted more pink around her with a layer set to hard light, and some purple in the really white part of the gif in the left hand corner with the layer set to normal. After that, I topped off the gif with some more selective color layers to make some minor tweaks in Jyn’s skin tone (aka just making it less red). Pro-tip: if you want your reds to be less red, increase the cyan in it or decrease the magentas.

And your final gif should look like something similar to this:

Please note that this tutorial isn’t going to guarantee the same results on every scene used, but most often you will have to paint some colors onto the gif yourself if you’re going for a pastel theme. There are lots of other ways to do it, like using a gradient or adjusting the white in a selective color layer, but for this gifset, I painted the colors on myself. I’m no pro at Photoshop and learn new things everyday, and usually end up with these kinds of things through lots of experimentation.

Step 1: CHOOSE YOUR OVERLAY

There are several gif overlays available on tumblr as well as elsewhere (free gif sites like giphy, imgur and gifer are great too.)

For this set, I used this gif. (I personally look for overlays based on what my set is about, and since this one was about turning points, so, well, a turning gif :P). This is what I’m going to call the overlay gif from now.

A few things to keep in mind while choosing:

Whether it is black and white. It is always better to choose a b&w overlay for this kind of edit (I will explain why in later steps), but don’t worry if it’s not, you can turn them b&w quite easily by using a few selective colour layers.

Whether it is a looping gif. This one is not hard and fast like the previous one, you can choose either a gif overlay that repeats itself continuously (like the one used here) or one with linear progress (like in this set). Just make sure you have got the right one before getting into the whole process.

Step 2: MAKE YOUR BACKGROUND GIF

As you can tell, we need to make two separate gifs before merging them. It’s preferable to make the background gif first, since this is the one whose positioning we have to keep an eye on. 

My background gifs are of the size 540x400, but you may of course make them bigger (smaller too, but that might not leave much room for your overlay gif). Now, it’s important to see that your background is not getting totally hidden by your foreground gif, and considering that the foreground will be taking a lot of space, it’s preferable to choose zoomed out scenes as your background gifs (or, if zoomed in, with the subject in the corners).

For the backgrounds in this set, my focus was on their powers and so I placed them accordingly.

As for colouring the background, I had decided early on to keep the colour restricted to the foreground only as the overlay covered a large part of the gif. You can of course choose to have a coloured background too, especially if your overlay is not as big.

This is my background gif from now:

Step 3: MAKE YOUR FOREGROUND GIF

So far so good, now comes the gif that will go in the overlay. Since my overlay is an expanding circle of 540x400, I kept the same dimensions for my gif. (You can make it any size that suits you, but just be careful to keep the dimensions according to your overlay gif!)

This is my gif after colouring:

(If you want the basics on colouring backgrounds of gifs, you can check out @yenvengerberg‘s wonderful colouring tutorial, it’s very comprehensive!)

Step 4: PLACE YOUR OVERLAY

Now comes the fun part! Open your overlay gif in Photoshop, and convert it to video timeline mode.

Then select all layers (Ctrl+Alt+A) and right click -> convert to smart object.

Next, open your foreground gif (in side by side tabs) and follow the same steps (convert to video timeline -> select all layers -> convert to smart object). Here’s what it looks like now:

Now, go back to the overlay gif, copy the gif layer, and paste it on top of the foreground gif layer, like so:

You may find a slight disparity in the size and positioning of the two gifs, if they are not of the exact same dimensions. You’ll need to click Ctrl+T (with the overlay layer selected) to adjust these.

And this is what it looks like now:

Set the blending mode of this layer to Darken (which basically displays the darker of the two layers, i.e. the white is hidden and the black dominates), and voila:

If you play the gif now, you will find them moving together. But there’s one small problem, the length of the overlay is much shorter than the main gif. Since the overlay is a looping gif, this is easily fixed. Duplicate your overlay layer, and drag it to the position where the original layer ends, like so:

Again, even the duplicated layer doesn’t cover the entire length of the main gif. So we need to duplicate it one more time, and trim the end of the new layer as necessary.

And we have our completed gif, which I’ll be calling my foreground gif from now:

Step 5: MERGE YOUR FOREGROUND AND BACKGROUND

Time for the final step. Open your background gif and the final foreground gif in new tabs. Follow the steps to convert each of them to smart objects (convert to video timeline -> select all layers -> convert to smart object). Copy the foreground gif layer onto the background gif, and you get this:

[Side note: The lengths of both the gifs should be equal, i.e. they should be ending at the exact same point in the timeline.]

Click Ctrl+T and resize and reposition where you want the foreground gif to be.

Now, if you play the gif, this is what you get:

We’re almost done! But we still need to remove the black square edges.

Open your overlay gif again, convert it to smart object and copy the gif layer onto the main gif. Place it between the background and the foreground gifs, like so:

Reposition and resize with Ctrl+T, so that it matches the foreground gif exactly. The properties tab will come in handy for this, as it will show you the size and position of your foreground gif and you can transform your overlay accordingly.

This is what they look like after matching up:

Now, with the overlay gif selected, click Image -> Adjustments -> Invert, and this happens:

Set the blending mode of the overlay gif to Darken, and you get:

Next, set the blending mode of the foreground gif to Lighten (which hides the black part and displays the white and lighter parts. This is why a b&w overlay is important to make Lighten and Darken work perfectly), and we’re done:

If you play it, you’ll see we have got the effect we want! All that’s left is to duplicate the overlay gif layer so that it covers the whole length of the gif, as we did in step 4. We need to duplicate it twice again, and reposition the duplicated layers to the original’s position. You can use the properties tab to do this again, simply look at the X and Y position of the original layer and input the values in the properties of the duplicated layers:

And finally, after adding text (I’m not including that part so that this doesn’t become too long, but if you need help with the curved text, let me know!), this is our completed gif:

Here are some good resources around tumblr to find overlay gifs: @octomoosey @overlaygifs  @bowiescoffee​ @bicepsie (You can surely find more by just searching “gif overlays”.)

You can experiment in a lot of ways with this method too. Here is another example of a gif made using this method, this time with this non-looping overlay gif:

1. The base

The process is very similar for each of the 3 gifs. First, you need to pick which scene will the base of your gif. You can crop your gif the way you want but keep in mind that you need space somewhere to put a second scene! Try not to pick busy shots because those will be harder to work with. Negative space and plain background are your best friends! The tricky part is that the other scene you will add on top of the base gif will only be nicely blended if it's put on a very dark or a very light area. Below are the shots I've chosen to be my base and, as you will notice, there is negative space around the main subject. Those dark areas will be where I'll add my new layers later.

Vincenzo's shoulder on the first gif makes a perfect area for blending layers because it is not only black but also is very plain! Chayoung's face adds a lot of contrast against this dark space

On the 2nd gif, there isn't a lot of space around her but there's enough on the right for what I have in mind so it's fine

Same with the 3rd gif. I cropped it so her face would be on the left, which leaves a bit of space on the right to add my new layers later

Our base gifs aren't done yet, we have to make the background cleaner so our blending results will look better. I will pick black because the background colors of the scenes I've selected are closer to black than white. However, if you're doing this with brighter shots, you should use white or any bright color! Add a new layer, select the brush tool (make sure it's set as a soft brush) and paint on top of the area you'll add your blended layers later.

This isn't a mandatory step but, in most cases, it is very useful! As an exemple, my 2nd gif needed it. As you can see on the previous picture, Chayoung is standing outside and the street lights are visible behind her on the right. Because this is where I will insert Vincenzo later, I need to clean up this area to end up with a plain and dark background. Here's the result after I added soft brush layers:

You can color your base gif now if you want to or do it later, it's up to you!

2. Blending

You're done with your base layer, which means it's now time to work on the gif you'll be blending! Finding the right scenes to blend is the hardest part of the process and you'll probably need to try this several times before you feel satisfied with your result. Don't feel bad about it, I'm also struggling and it's ok! It takes some practice to understand how blending works so be patient!

Put your gifs on the same file

Before blending our gifs together, we need to have them both on the same file. First, just open the gif you've selected to be blended and make sure you're working with timeline and not layers for all of your gifs (here's where to convert to timeline if you need help). Select all the layers from your future blended gif and put them all in one folder. Now, they are ready to join the base gif! Just select the folder and drag it to your base gif. Place it roughly where you want it to be and resize it if it needs to be.

Now that you have both gifs on the same file, you may need to adjust the length of your gif. Indeed, it is very likely that your base gif and your blended gif don't have the same number of frames, which means that one of your gif may run longer than the other. This is what happened with the first gif of my gifset. As you can see on the timeline below, the gif I wanted to blend was shorter than my base gif.

To fix this, just clic on the right handle on top of the timeline and slide it where your shorter gif ends. Your final gif will now end when the shortest gif ends!

Blending mode

It's now time to change the folder's blending mode! Since I'm making dark gifs, I will be selecting the folder and setting its blending mode to lighten. Below is the before and after of my middle gif. You can try using different blending modes as the result will be really different from one gif to another. Sometimes, screen gives a nice result as well. However, if you're working with light backgrounds, lighten will not work at all and you'll have to set it as darken instead. I really suggest you to experiment with different modes and colors to understand how it works!

Here, changing the blending mode helps making a smooth transition between Chayoung and Vincenzo but it's not enough for the rest of the gif because the edges of Vincenzo's gif are still visible, as well as the lights in the background. It's fine, let's just apply a layer mask!

Layer mask

To use a layer mask, make sure you've selected the folder you've set the blending mode to lighten and click on this icon. The layer mask will help us hide what we don't want to show! Select the eraser and make it as soft as possible. Now, erase the parts you want to hide. Don't worry, it won't actually erase your layers, it will simply hide those parts! If you erased too much, just pick the brush tool and paint on top of the areas you want to be visible.

Here's my result. Looks better, right?

I'm almost done with the blending process of this gif but I feel like Vincenzo's part needs more contrasts... When you're blending gifs, contrasts are important because they can drastically change your result. I haven't applied any coloring layer to Vincenzo's gif yet so I will increase the blacks and whites using a levels layer. But... if I create a new layer, it will also apply to Chayoung, right? So how do we do? It's actually simple: we will be creating a clipping mask!

Clipping mask

I need to add a levels layer so this is what I will be clipping but the clipping mask technique can be used with any kind of layer! I create a levels layer and make sure this layer is placed right above the blended folder. Then, we right-click on it and select "create clipping mask". It's done! Now, the layer will only apply for what is inside the folder (it doesn't have to be a folder, you can also clip a layer to another layer).

You're done with blending!

You're now free to color your gif the way you want! Remember you can create clipping masks if you need to color the scenes separately. Here's my final result:

I've used to same blending process for the other gifs as well. You can blend as many scenes as you want. For instance, I've used 3 different scenes for the last gif but the process was the same!

My final step was to add the quote on each gif. The main font I've used is Blastrick (which isn't a free font but I was able to get it for free a while ago when it was part of Creative Market's weekly free goods). I've used Algerian for the word "mine" on the last gif and I believe this font was actually pre-installed in Windows so you might have it too on your computer!

First things first is you’re gonna wanna pick out your media of choice to gif. I’m using My Chemical Romance’s Helena music video for the Helena gif and the outtake version for Gerard’s gif.  

These two gifs are only cropped and sharpened. I prefer to not color until the end but you can do it before if you wish. Also PLEASE have the gifs have the SAME amount of frames. As you can see my Helena gif is smaller in length and that’s because that’s gonna be our “tear” gif. I would recommend both gifs to be the same width. I’m only doing one tear for this gif, but you can add more if you want. How I did all my tears from my Vanya edit is all followed the same.

After you have your gifs, pull up and focus on the gif you’re gonna ‘tear’. You’re gonna want a paper tear overlay to mask on to your gif. I suggest Google searching and checking out Tumblr resource blogs. I find resource blogs and also DeviantART to be great places to find textures, overlays, etc. I tear I will being using is from DeviantART from a pack of tear textures. You can find the pack here. 

Once you pick your texture of choice, move it to your tear gif and place it how you like:

Mine looks a little funny because the pack’s textures were a little transparent. If you use it, make sure to Duplicate it and Merge it until you get a solid color. 

Next, click on the little box of your texture layer on the right and click on Select Pixels:

And now the texture is highlighted:

Yes I know my texture is still a little transparent when I said to fix it because I didn’t do it until I figured out later please do as I say not as I do lol

You could start to do the masking here, but with my tear it won’t show the part I want which is the middle. So to fix that we are gonna invert the highlight bit by clicking right and selecting Select Inverse:

Now the part I want is the highlighted:

Now on to masking! Here’s a quick little trick I learned with playing around with setting a bit ago.

On your left timeline, move your texture layer under your group of gif files and then add a mask to said group of files:

You can learn how to move the frames of a gif to a group here in one of my old tutorials. 

And Ta-Da! Our gif is now looking like this:

Our tear gif is ready! You can, of course, stop right here but I wanna show you 2 different styles of tears I have gotten from doing this. One has a white outline, and one doesn’t. 

1. White Outline: After you finish your gif, save it as normal and then bring it back up and move it to your base gif. Even if you got rid of the white texture layer, you might still have that white border. But that’s not a bad thing depending on the look you want. It’s a good way to get a pop of white or outline the tear if you suits your likings.

2. No White Outline: Once you finish your gif, don’t save it and go ahead and copy your frames from your Timeline. Paste them Over the Selection of your base gif and now you don’t have it. 

Whichever tickles your fancy, go ahead and follow it. For my final gif I’m going with the white border because what I wanna do is go heavy on the red and the white will make it pop out more. 

From this point, go ahead and color your gif if you haven’t yet, style, customize and have fun! Here’s my final product:

i use photoshop cc 2019, but i think everything should be the same from ps5 onwards.

my first layer is always exposure. the values i use depend on the gif, but it’s usually 0.002 for offset, 0.90 for gamma correction and something between 0.75 and 2.5 for exposure. the specific settings i used for this gif are below.

as you can see, the gif is a lot brighter and easier to see than the original.

after that, i do brightness, if i think it’s necessary (the values depend on the gif but usually i go for something between 20 and 75 for brightness and i don’t change the contrast).

in this gif i didn’t think brightness was necessary at this point, so i jumped straight to levels. i use levels to make the blacks a little darker because i like my gifs with very defined blacks. depending on how dark the blacks already are, i choose the rbg channel and put either 5 or 10 in the first arrow and then either 0.80 or 0.90 on the second. in this case, the blacks were already quite defined, so i stuck to 5 and 0.90.

after levels comes colour balance, which i use to make the gif tone closer to what i want. i like my gifs with blue backgrounds and warm skin tones, so i usually up the blues and reds. in this case, upping the blues in shadows made the skintone very pink, so i added yellows in the highlights to balance it out.

after this, i add selective color layers. usually at least two, sometimes more. the first layer i use to mess with reds and yellows to change the skintone. i also add whites if there’s a lot of brightness in the character’s face (between 25 and 75). in this case, since i wanted the background to be blue, i also changed the greens to blues (for this, you just change the blue to +100 and yellow to -100 on greens).

the remaining selective layers are to make the blues more vibrant/brighter.

i also upped the magentas and yellows in the magenta to make the colour of the shirt more even.

once i’m happy with the selective color layers, i add another levels layer. once again, 10 on the first arrow on rgb, but something between 1.10 and 1.30 on the second arrow to make the gif brighter. i also change the blue channel. i usually go overboard with the reds and yellows in selective color, so this balances that out. it also makes the blue even more vibrant. i put 10 on the first arrow in the blue channel, between 1.10 and 1.30 in the second and then between 225 and 245 on the third.

after that, i add a brightness layer, if necessary (between 20 and 50).

the last step is vibrance, to make the colours pop a little more. i don’t usually mess with saturation values, only vibrance (between 50 and 100).