#k8*tutorial

Whenever I colour correct difficult scenes I get asked how I did it and the answer is always the same: channel mixer. 

I know it seems like a daunting adjustment layer and a minor mistake can drastically change your gif, but I’m here to tell you (and teach you) how to avoid that and use channel mixer as best as possible!

Things you’ll need: - Photoshop - a difficult scene - 10 mins time - a ton of patience and willingness to try

I’m going to briefly explain what exactly the channel mixer adjustment layer is and how it works, and then show you the process on a gif. 

Before we begin, I’d like to give a shout out to Val / @poisons-ivy and Hella / @katbishop for pushing me to learn how to use channel mixer and for helping out with this tutorial. 

Now, a fun fact to start us off: in all things photoshop and digital screens, the primary colours are red-blue-green.

I’m pretty sure everybody learned in elementary school that the primary colours are red-blue-yellow. There’s a whole explanation for why that’s not true which I am not going to delve into because I still think it’s absolutely bonkers and it would make this tutorial even longer than it already is, but HERE is a link to that explanation if you’re interested in reading about it. (it also explains the difference between RGB and CMYK which I thought was really cool).

In Photoshop and our eyes, RGB is primary and I’m going to leave this nifty little chart here for you to use as a lil cheat sheet:

The channel mixer adjustment layer works with RGB. It basically “breaks down” your canvas into those three colours, and gives you some sliders to adjust those colours.

I’m going to get into how to fix a specific colour-washed scene in just a minute — first I want to show you what it looks like and what happens when you move certain sliders.

I picked a neutral scene that has the three primary colours and where the whites are truly white and the blacks are truly black (thank you Mean Girls!)

This is what the gif looks like with no colouring:

as we progress through this guide, I want you to keep looking at the following: RED - Gretchen’s shirt with the red diamonds GREEN - the Perrier can in front of Karen BLUE - the empty chair in front of Karen and/or the blue shirt just behind Gretchen

This is what the channel mixer looks like when you open it up:

as you can see, in the red channel, the red is set to +100, green to 0 and blue to 0, and same for the others. The “main” colour of the channel you select is always set to +100.

Now, because no colour is purely one colour, once you start moving the sliders it’ll affect most/the entire canvas. But as you adjust, the channels will add and subtract colours based on what’s already there.

Look at what happens when I slide the red from +100 to +150

compare that to if i move the green up to +50

or the blue up to +50

Look at the red colour on Gretchen’s shirt. When adding the red to the canvas, the first one looks brighter and “redder”, the second (green adjustment) looks slightly muted, and the third (blue) looks darker.

But if you look at the other things I told you to keep an eye on (Perrier can and chair up front), you’ll see that those are also adjusted. That’s because we’re working in the RED channel right now, and in the red channel you can add red to other colours as well.

In the second image, the green looks almost yellower (because mixing red with green makes yellow).

In the third image, the blue chair looks more purple/pinkish (because mixing red with blue makes magenta).

Look at how different the canvas looks based on which slider you use:

and here you can see what happens when you play with the other channels:

Now that we’ve talked addition, let’s talk subtraction.

If you remember your RGB colour circle, you’ll realise that removing a colour means the overall canvas will shift more into the opposing colour.

Removing red will make your canvas more cyan, removing green leads to more magenta, and removing blue gives more yellow.

RED - CYAN GREEN - MAGENTA BLUE - YELLOW

These are the images after I’ve removed 50 points off each slider

Hopefully you now understand the theory of Channel Mixer!

Now let’s get to practice.

You can colour correct a lot of scenes using the channel mixer because you can select which colours you want to target and what you want to mix them with. It’s a sort of double-layered approach.

I myself started using channel mixer to remove yellow tint from movies and from there I branched out to other colours.

I’m going to show the process using a slightly yellow tinted scene — not entirely yellow washed because this is a channel mixer tutorial and usually when you have a fully colour washed scene it’s going to take more than just channel mixer to fix.

The way I like thinking about it in my brain is that the three RGB primary colours are discs that I move closer and further from each other. With a yellow scene like below, that means the blue disc has strayed too far from the center (which is neutral — white).

So my first step is to go to the Blue channel and play around there. Since I want to push more blue into the reds and greens, I move those sliders up a bit, to +15 each. 

But now you can see my gif is a little peach coloured. Too much red/magenta. Time to remove some of that by going into the Red channel.

There I drag the red slider down until I like what it looks like and end up with this:

I’ve effectively removed the yellow tint and gotten to a great starting point for my colouring because the gif looks much more neutralised. It’s a great base to work with.

For this gif, I’ve gone ahead and coloured it very minimally (a bit of levels, selective colour, hue/saturation) and ended up with:

I used only four layers (and the channel mixer is doing the heavy lifting) and look at the difference:

You can do so many things with channel mixer! Whenever I see a tinted scene, Channel Mixer is my very first step.

Here are some more examples:

two from @poisons-ivy:

and two from @katbishop:

As you can see, you can neutralise almost any colour using Channel Mixer. I hope I’ve managed to explain this great adjustment layer and how it works!

if you have any questions or if there’s anything confusing in this tutorial, my inbox is always open! :)

(and once again a great big thank you to Val / @poisons-ivy and Hella / @katbishop​ for all the help — be sure to check out their stuff!)

How to fix orange-washed characters

recently I’ve been seeing a lot of this

and not enough of this

and I get it, I really do.

Making vibrantly coloured gifs with black and brown actors can sometimes present unique challenges, doubly so when the source material is lit with a candle one scene and with disco lights the next.

A lot of the time, in an effort to avoid whitewashing actors, gifmakers will instead (accidentally) over-saturate them and end up with orange-washed actors.

so I thought I’d share two quick methods I learned while giffing Lovecraft Country (aka a show with a black cast varying in shades, and with the most random and worst lighting I’ve ever had the pleasure of giffing)

They’re both super simple and can be used almost universally (together or individually) to tone down the orange hue when making vibrantly coloured gifs.

Method 1: using the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer

This is my go-to adjustment.

I’ve gone ahead and made my gif, sharpened and put some basic colouring on there (my usual mix is curves-selective color-hue/saturation).

This is what I’m left with:

You can see that he looks way more orange that he should

what I do than is go in with my hue/saturation layer and isolate the Reds. I lower the saturation down (in this case all the way to -30) and sometimes I even fiddle with the lightness (just to keep the gifs true to skintone).

If their features become a little washed out in terms of colour, instead of upping the red again or the overall saturation, I like to use a vibrance layer. It doesn’t add colour so much as it makes it pop a little bit more.

So my coloured gif, with these settings:

gets you this:

and here’s a side by side with no adjustment layers:

another example: (without the adjustment on the left, and with on the right)

I know there will be scenarios in which your actor is in a very red scene and lowering the red saturation can affect the entire gif. In those cases I like to use layer masks and a soft brush to only remove the reds from skin (instead of the entire gif).

And if it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work. I think especially when it’s clear that the scene is incredibly red, people will be more understanding and at the end of the day, it’s up to you to decide what looks best!

Method 2: using the Selective Colour adjustment layer

I like using this method for more subtle cases; where the colouring looks alright but adding a selective colour layer to it will just push it that last bit to looking Great.

Take this gif, for example:

It’s pretty good but look what happens when I add a selective colour layer with these values:

It’s a minor change but it looks much more true to the actor’s skin colour.

So there you have it. The quick and easy way to make sure you don’t make your actors look orange! Be sure to play around with the settings to see what suits your gif the best, since no two actors are the same, and more than anything be sure to have fun!

(if this tutorial helps you in any way, please REBLOG it)

things you will need:

photoshop

some fun fonts (x)(x)

a gold foil picture (x)

a couple of gradients (x)

I get most of my resources (fonts, graphics, etc) from Creative Market which you should def check out if you don’t know it yet — they have 6 free resources every Monday and there’s usually some really cool stuff to be found there!

If you’re looking for how I did the gifs in the AKA canvas, check out this tutorial (but basically it’s just a gif clipped to a text layer with a clipping mask)

GIF 1

1. type your word and slap some layer effects on there to make it stand out

2. put the foil picture on your gif and be sure to clip it to the text using a clipping mask (this is to prevent it from covering the whole gif)

I thought my foil was a little bleh so I put a hue/saturation adjustment layer on it to make it prettier

3. type out your little text on the bottom

et voila! finished gif:

GIF 2

1. type your text in your preferred font and then we go into layer effects again

add some shadow

add a gradient overlay

and then lower the opacity of the entire thing

2. add your thin text over it

3. and then to make it all fancy, give your gif a lil border

and bam! finished gif:

GIF 3

1. write out your text and duplicate it. (hide the second layer for now)

2. give it a gradient overlay and a colour overlay (make sure the gradient is set to multiply and the colour is set to colour blend mode)

3. set the layer blending mode to difference

4. unhide the second text layer and open your layer style window

5. give it a lil outer glow

6. set the stroke to 1px and white

7. now drop that layer fill to 0 to get rid of everything except the stroke and outer glow

8. nudge the second layer (which is basically only stroke) a little bit down and to the side and you’re done!

GIF 4

this one’s a bit more work but it’s not that difficult!

1. make your text and set the font colour to black and open your layer style

2. give the text a gradient overlay (colour overlay works too!) and set it to multiply

3. go to blending options and set your layer to difference

here’s where it gets fun!

4. duplicate the layer as many times as you want and place them at the top and bottom (arrange them however you like)

I wanted a sort of stacked effect so I made sure to have overlap, but it ends up looking a little wack:

so here come the handy dandy layer masks!

5. give each text layer their layer mask and then hide all of them except the middle text and the one you’ll be working with

6. using your marquee tool, select the area you’d like to mask and use a black brush to colour it in (make sure the layer mask is selected and not the actual layer!)

repeat with the other text layers

7. put all the text layers in a group and then click on the layer style and apply a drop shadow and outer glow to the whole group (doing it for the group instead of individual will prevent the shadows from showing over other text layers)

8. I wanted to add some more colour so I added a hue/sat layer

you can also play with the hue settings to get other fun colours

and you’re done!

So there you have it! A quick walkthrough of how I did the text effects for my latest Dinah Lance set. My suggestion is to just play around with the blending modes and colours and have some fun!

if you have any questions or if there’s anything confusing in this tutorial, my inbox is always open! :)

and if this helped you in any way, please REBLOG it