#phelp

I'll be teaching you how to color a gif. Before you continue reading, you should have some knowledge of photoshop and how to make gifs. If not, I can link you to a couple of helpful tutorials. Here and here. First things first, you need to make the gif. Here's how the gif looks without coloring.

***You can choose to sharpen your gif now or later on. I chose to sharpen the gif first. Next create a folder to store your coloring. It's easier to have your coloring in a single folder for organizational purposes. You do that by clicking the small folder icon.

Once your mouse hovers over the icon, it will say "create a new group". Click it to create your folder.

Now it's time to color! I will explain how I achieved this coloring.

1. Curves

Go to Layer, New Adjustment Layer, and click on Curves. Once the window for curves pops up, click auto. Auto creates an easy working ground for coloring.

2. Gradient Map

Next step is to add a gradient map. Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Gradient Map. Click on the default gradient to change it. The gradient editor window will pop up. The color of the first block should be black and the second white.

Go to your layers menu. Change the mode to your gradient layer to soft light.

3. Color Balance

On to color balance. Go to Layer, New Adjustment Layer, and click on Color Balance. Here's your chance to play around the coloring. I usually start out with changing the settings to "Shadows". Here's my settings for shadows. Shadows are the colors that aren't the main focus of the image.

Then click on "Midtones" and play around with those settings. Here's the settings I chose for midtones. Midtones are colors that are the main focus of parts of the image, but not the entire image.

I never change the "Highlight" settings because they make the whole image a single color.

4. Selective Color

Now on to selective color. If you want make a specific color pop or change a specific color to another, selective coloring is your best friend.

Go to Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Selective Coloring. I decided to first play around with the colors "reds". These are my settings.

--- ***Here's an example to show you what selective coloring can do. Don't do this if you want to achieve the final coloring.*** Let's say I want to change the color of Giner's dress. You would now need to go to the "magentas" color tab. Here's how the image looks without changing the color.

Now you can play around with the settings to either make the color purple either darker/lighter or even a different color. I wanted to make the dress blue. Here are the settings and the transformation.

--- 5. Color Fill. Create a color fill layer. Layer. New Fill Layer. Solid Color. For this gif coloring, I chose a light brown, #cd9d64 Go to the layer settings for the solid color layer and change it from normal to soft light.

You're almost done!

6) Brightness/Contrast

The last step is to fix the lighting. Because this gif has amazing light, I decided to darken it a bit. Click on Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Brightness/Contrast. Here are my settings.

When I made this coloring, I didn't change the contrast settings, but I recommend you to in order to make your gif look better. Here are my settings for contrast.

Here's the gif without contrast:

Here's the gif with contrast:

Spot the difference?