#giffing tips

I was asked by several people about my technique for coloring the pride flag gifsets I made for spn pride week, like this one:

so i gave in and made a quick thing that i hope works for some of you looking to try! it’s kinda fun and not too complicated, so here are the steps (screenshots and explanations below the cut):

in your most recent merwaine fest gifset (which is stunning and i never noticed that parallel before), how did you manage to get the purple to only be on certain parts (like gwaine's gambeson sleeve)? is it using the layer adjustment thing of 'darker colour'? i've usually had to do it with a brush and overlay on the specific bit, which can make it look messy, so i just wondered if there was an easier way?

please don't feel you have to answer this if you'd rather not, though. your gifs never cease to amaze me and i hope you have a wonderful evening :)

can’t believe i woke up to sell my trade secrets today 😔✌️(i’m kidding. i love you anon. thank you for the ask!)

i’m not sure what program you’re using but in photopea there’s an adjustment layer you can add by going to Layer > New Adjusment Layer > Selective Color which allows you to change specific colours in the gif.

So let’s start with this gif that’s got the normal color balance/brightness/contrast/saturation adjustments:

so say i’m feeling magenta today and want to change the colour of the blue carriage. I would go to the options in the top bar and go Layer > New Adjusment Layer > Selective Color. This will pop up:

as you can see in the adjustment settings to the left, I’ve selected the Blue in Colours: because that’s the colour I want to change. From there it’s a matter of fiddling with the bars to get to magenta. By setting the adjustments to those shown above, I get this:

yay! magenta carriage!! but wait -- merlin and random guy number 1 got magentified too????

to prevent that from happening and focus the colour change to the carriage only, you can click the white box in the selective color layer. this is called a raster mask, and it specifies where you want the adjustment to happen. (it’s the white box that’s outlined in the picture below)

all you have to do from here is select the erase tool and erase the part of the gif where you don’t want the blue to be magentified. the erased portion should be shown as a black mark in the box. (tip: using a soft-edged eraser works better most of the time in making the gifset look neat!)

aaaaand voila!

(requested by anon)

hi there!! this post will be explaining how to add effects like coloring and sharpening to your gifs on ezgif.com! (under the cut) i will be showing how to go from the first gif to the second gif:

This post is some top tips for colouring gifs that I’ve learned from colouring my own gifs over the last year or so.

It’s for people that already know how to gif and have perhaps been using other people’s PSDs or have been trying to colour themselves but haven’t quite got the hang of it yet or have been colouring themselves but don’t like the results.

For reference you can find all of my giffing tutorials here.

Don’t use PSD’s - If you learn how to colour your own gifs and then attempt to create a couple of PSDs to use across all of your gifs, you’re most likely going to have crappy results. Every gif (even if they’re from the same scene) will need different layers and settings to make it work. In the time it’ll take you to adjust your PSD’s to suit your gifs, it would be faster to just colour it from scratch. Some people like to have a “signature” look with their colourings, which I understand, but it’s tricky to pull off, particularly if you’re a beginner and you’re giffing multiple fandoms. Which brings me nicely to the next tip. 

Take each gif individually - The best approach to take, in my opinion, is to colour each gif individually. Sometimes if you’re giffing just one scene it is feasible to use the same PSD on every gif, but even then the lighting can be different because the scene has actually been filmed in two or more different takes. 

Make use of your drafts - Drafts serve a purpose - so we can draft things, duh! But until recently, I didn’t realise how useful they could be in making gifs. When you’re in the process of making a gifset, create a post and save it to your drafts. As you make each gif and save it, add it to the post and that way you can see what your gifset is going to look like as it unfolds. It enables you to make sure the colourings of your gifset match because you can see all of the gifs together. And it also means you can simply pop over to PS and add a little brightness or adjust colour balance to make sure the gifs all look similar.

Don’t get too overwhelmed with it - Easier said than done, I know, but I found that the biggest hindrance to me colouring was thinking it was a lot harder than it actually is. Tutorials can seem long and overwhelming, but when you break it down and put it into practice a few times, you’ll realise it’s not as tricky as you think it is. Some gifs can be a lot harder to colour than others, but 9 times out of 10 when I’m making gifs it takes about 5 minutes. A lot of the time I sharpen it, add curves and the gif already looks great, so it’s really not as hard as it seems. 

Practice, practice, practice - Colouring like anything else in life is not something that you’ll be able to do overnight. I’m still learning new things and better methods all the time even after a year of doing it. Experiment, read as many tutorials as you can and just get used to it. When I switched from PS CS5 to CC there were quite a few changes to the methods of giffing and for about 3 weeks I barely giffed because I couldn’t get over the hurdle of having to learn a new process, but now I’m completely used to it. So persevere and set aside a couple of times a week to practice. You don’t even have to post what you make, just practice for yourself. 

Get an eye for colours/what looks good - Like I’ve said time and time again in all of my tutorials, it’s all about judgement when it comes to colouring. Some people may look at my gifs and think I coloured them badly (hell, I do most of the time lmao) or that they would have coloured it differently but that’s the point - everyone has their preferences. Don’t try to replicate somebody else’s colouring exactly, because that’ll never happen (even if you follow every tutorial they have) create colourings that you like. Figure out whether you like pale gifs, vibrant gifs or black and white gifs. Do you like high contrast or low contrast? Bright gifs or not-so-bright gifs? Once you feel confident with the process of colouring gifs, the best thing to do is step away from tutorials and practice colouring by yourself, and eventually you’ll develop your own colouring techniques and preferences without even realising. 

Learn the function of each layer - It’s easy to follow tutorials without fully understanding what the hell you’re doing or what any of it means (I did exactly the same in the beginning), but understanding what each layer does yourself will really help you to colour. The basics are that curves, levels and brightness/contrast change the brightness and colour balance and selective colours change the colour. But there’s more to it than that and each layer serves different purposes. For example, if a gif is particularly red, if you try to go to colour balance and reduce the red right down the gif is going to end up looking awful and most likely green/yellow. The best approach to take in this case would be to apply a little colour balance to reduce the redness and then go in with selective colours and increase the cyan in Reds. You’ll learn the best way to tackle these things by going back to the above tip - practice, practice, practice! 

Everything in moderation - Before I started colouring my own gifs I used PSD’s and a lot of them had 20+ layers. Since I didn’t colour myself, I assumed that was normal, but personally, I rarely exceed 6 layers. It’s not necessary to colour the crap out of a gif with multiple layers of contrast, selective colours etc. Depending on your tastes you may want to do that and that’s fine, but it’s very easy to create good gifs without adding lots of layers and making lots of changes. 

my first tutorial/list of giffing tips went down well, I think, so I figured I should do another one for a friend - or several, hopefully.

this tutorial will be helpful presuming you already know how to make a gif (importing frames, etc) and how to colour it.

I’m going to show you how to get from this:

to this:

as you can see, the second gif has the text clearly in the centre. more under the cut.

Hello! My apologies for the late reply 😔 For me, gif quality tends to depend on the quality of the original video itself and sharpening. I try to use 1080p for all of my gifs, and then sharpen them on photopea. (But since I convert the video to gif in ezgif first, there's some noise that comes through the ezgif conversion which ends up lessening the quality). If you want tips for sharpening, try checking out online tutorials. Most of the tutorials for photoshop work on photopea too!

One method that @ughmerlin told me is to sharpen the gifs (in 0.4px for example), duplicate the gif file, sharpen the duplicated file again (0.4px), duplicate the double sharpened file, and then add a 1px gaussian blur to that second duplicate. Now you have three files. Set the opacity of the original to 100%, the double-sharpened to 50%, and the blurred double sharpened to 20%. Now collapse the three files, select all of them, go to layers > animation > merge. This will possibly create better sharpening, but at the end of the day it does depend, mostly, on the quality of the original video.