just for reference, the amount of work gifmakers put into taking badly-lit, murky, flat footage and turning it into something dynamic and nice to look at is astronomical
even in a relatively well-lit, color-balanced show like stranger things [don't get me STARTED on the lighting in Every Period Drama Ever] it took a ton of tweaking to take this:
bonus split view of the unedited footage and my many adjustment layers:
i don't have the files on hand so i can't tell you exactly how many adjustment layers, but there's at least four on that gif alone, and they all took fiddling around with to get right. a LOT of effort goes into cleaning up even the best footage, cropping shots, and rendering gifs, and these aren't even anything fancy—no overlays or fades, no text, no playing with colors or insets, which add on WAY more work—just gifs of the scene.
gifmakers create out of love, just like fanartists and fic writers do. reposting gifs instead of reblogging them means we don't get to see whether people enjoy what we put so much time and effort into, and it means we don't get credit for the work we put in. if you wouldn't repost fanart, please don't repost gifs either.
