#ps ref

1) Using 1080p videos as source material for the gifs. I used to gif with 480p and 720p before The Untamed (I used 1080p for The Untamed) and it makes such a difference! It’s much easier to get sharper gifs with 1080p.

2) Black colour: Enhancing the black colour and shadows on gifs makes them seem sharper. These are the settings I generally follow for black colour:

Selective Colour: I increase the black here until I like how it looks

Gradient Map:

I use a black and white gradient map on top of my colouring, set it to Soft Light and opacity anywhere between 30-60% depending on the scene and the mood I’m going for. (Thanks for this tip, @highwarlockkareena )

3) Not a very consistent rule, but I’ve noticed that using fewer adjustment layers that change the colours sometimes makes the gifs sharper. eg. If I make a lot of changes with the Selective Colours adjustment apart from the blacks, that tends to look grainier. 

4) Smart sharpening: I sharpen my gifs right at the end, but I know others who sharpen before they colour and the results don’t really vary much, so you can do whichever order you’re comfortable with. After colouring and getting the gifs to the shape and size I want for tumblr, I convert my frames to timeline mode. 

Then I select all my scene frames and convert to smart object.

Then, I Smart Sharpen with these settings:

This usually is enough, but I recently found out from @lan-xichens that in case the gifs still aren’t sharp enough, you can add a second lens blur sharpen layer with these settings. But I only do this for less-than-1080p gifs if my previous settings don’t work enough:

And then I save for web with these settings:

The basics

This might seem very obvious but half the quality of your gifs will depend on the source you use. Always go for imports that are 720p or 1080p, also try avoiding using videos from youtube, twitter or other websites because they tend to come out a lot grainier than a 1080p download.

The second thing is picking your scene. Some scenes are a nightmare to colour and no matter what you do, it’s always going to turn out grainy.You have to pick scenes that aren’t too saturated with one colour or aren’t too dark, in which case adding a curves or brightness layer will end up making the gif pixelated. The best example I can give for a bad scene is the bar scene in TFA:

It is a nightmare, I’ve been giffing for years and I still avoid this scene like the plague because it’s downright impossible to colour. If you really want to gif a scene like that, my best advice would be making it black and white, otherwise try to pick bright scenes with a lot of colour.

Next is sizing your gif. Tumblr is very particular about the size of gifs/graphics so you need to make sure your gifset is either 540px (1 per line), 268px (2 per line) or 177px (3 per line) anything else will make your image blurry on your dashboard.

The last step before you start colouring is sharpening. Sharpening your gifs is very important because it makes your image clearer and more defined. There are a tonne of really good actions you can find on @yeahps​ and @chaoticresources​ along with specified instructions on how to use them. I prefer to sharpen my gifs before I colour them but some people do it after, it really depends on your personal preference and the action you’re using.

     2. Colouring

I’m going to be using this gif as an example because it’s pretty bright and relatively easy to colour:

I always start off by adding a curves layer, I like a lot of contrast in my gifs so I always balance the brightness by increasing the black shadows. For a gif like this one, it’s already pretty bright so I don’t need to do too much in terms of messing around with the curves. If your gif is very dark, you can use the set point method which I’ve explained here. Here is what my gif looks like now:

The gif still looks somewhat washed out to me so I like to add a contract layer to make the black tones pop out a little more:

Now that we’ve finished with the base, we can move on to colouring the gif itself. I usually find two or three colours I want to enhance in my gif and work on those, in this case I’m going to focus on the greens, yellows and purples. Using the selective colour tool, go to each tab and start adjusting each colour. For example, I want the background to be more vibrant so I’ll go to the yellows tab and focus on the cyan and yellow sliders. Make sure you don’t change the natural colour too much as that’ll also make your gif grainy. Because we’re dealing with greens/yellows here I’ll focus on the cyan-red and yellow-blue sliders, if we were dealing with purples then I’d mostly use the magenta-green slider and so on.

So going through the same process for all the colours I wanted to adjust, I now have a gif that's a lot more vibrant and colourful:

If you’d like it to be even more bright and vibrant you can add a final vibrance layer. The amount of vibrance you add also depends on the scene you’ve chosen. Some gifs (especially the bright ones) will still look good if you add a lot of vibrance while others will look deep fried. 

And now you’re done colouring your gif!

   3. Saving

This is pretty straightforward, you just need to save through the ‘Save for Web & Devices’ option and make sure your gif is under 3MB otherwise it’ll freeze. I personally like to add a ‘pattern’ dither, but some people prefer using noise or even no dither, it’s pretty much up to you. 

And that it! You now have a bright and vibrant gif that you can upload and post straight away. I do wanna say though that as of right now tumblr has messed up dashboard gifs and has made them grainy so if even after all this your gif still look somewhat grainy when you upload it, it’s most likely due to the newest tumblr update. 

1. After just sharpening my gif looks like this

2. Add a Levels layer. Hit “auto”. If it looks good, keep it and add +5 to blacks in RGB preset (the first lever from the left). If it looks gross (eq. changed the colors too much) reset the layer and just add +5 to the blacks. In this case i kept the auto adjustment

3. Now I’m not really sure how to explain it well and there’s already a tutorial on it here so just,, follow it and color balance that shit!! My gif looks like this now

4. Next goes Exposure, move the gamma correction and exposure levers to the right a bit until it looks fine, but don’t brighten it all the way you want it yet, we’ll add a brighten layer later on! 

5. Add a b&w Gradient Map and set it to soft light to add a bit more contrast. Play with opacity until it looks good. In this gif i settled on 20% but most of the time i keep it between 15 and 30%.

6. Now the promised Brightness/Contrast layer! Move the brightness lever around until you’re satisfed with the outcome but don’t touch the contrast one. If you think there isn’t enough contrast, up the opacity of the gradient map layer.

7. Now you’re almost done! You just need some finishing touches (it depends on the gif tho). Check if it isn’t too grainy, if it is add a Selective Color layer and up the black in the blacks and/or neutrals preset. If there are people in your gif, check if their skin tones are “right”, if not, correct them playing with the reds (and maybe yellows) on a Selective Color layer (you might want to put the skin correction layer under the birghtening layer, it looks better that way sometimes). Here i darkened Stacker’s skin and added a little black to neutrals