#ps stuff

How do you make a scene in which the character looks dark and blue, and can get more warmer nuances to get the skin color. I'm really terrible when I do a dark scene the character disappears it's terrible.

Thanks for your answer, Jackie.

First of all, you like JC? Let’s be besties! Second, I’m sorry it took me days to get to this :( Character looks dark and blue. You mean something like this?

RINA, a character graphic template.

FONTS USED: Gobold

please don’t redistribute.

only a little bit of photoshop knowledge is needed for this template

you can edit it however you’d like but please don’t make it unrecognizable.

and most importantly, i hope you enjoy!

anon, you're too kind! thank you so much!!💌

I'm no ps wizard, and I’ve never done a tutorial but I do love talking about ps so I can try to give you some tips. I colour each scene differently so these are just basic for trying to keep your gifs crisp. (english isn't my first language and I run ps in danish so bear with me)

✿ Footage - always try to get the best footage you can! I recommend using 2160p or 1080p ddls, not all 2160p files will be same quality, as a guideline I always go for the bigger file.

✿ Brightening and contrast - both can be super harsh on the quality! two things I use that help me are 1. use a gradient map, set to B/W, then set layer from normal to luminosity, I find this adds depth in a more gentle way than just using contrast and you can adjust easily by changing the opacity. 2. for both contrast and brightening certain areas I use selective colours and toggle the black option for the black and white in each their direction. try to be gentle when colouring and play around with different setting, you can always group with ctrl+g and try again without losing your colouring!

✿ Sharpening/export settings - I export my gifs as adaptive/selective + noise, I recommend trying some different ones to get a feel for what they do to a gif! for sharpening I use the same smart sharpen settings 9/10 times, occasionally I’ll use 0,5 for a blurry gif or 0,3 for a 268px gif.

✿ Editing footage -probably the only unique(ish) tip I can give as I haven’t seen other creators talk about it. for certain scenes that are very dark, tinted or otherwise hard to colour in ps without losing quality, I sometimes edit the footage in my media playback program (I use potplayer) before I colour in ps.

I did this with my #soft frog parents set, this is the scene:

In potplayer I edited brightness, contrast and hue

Now editing in ps is much easier, let me know if you need further explanation on this!

hi nonnie! this got kinda long lol

my main recommendation is this tutorial by chloezhao; it's super detailed and easy to follow, and will get you through the whole process from acquiring your files to sharpening and coloring your gifs. an additional tutorial i strongly recommend is this one by anya-chalotra (also every other tutorial in her resources tag is fantastic); it goes further into sharpening and, really importantly, save settings—that's a part of giffing that's often overlooked but has a major impact on how your stuff ends up looking. i personally save with adaptive, diffusion (100%), bicubic, but every other gifmaker will have a different take on this, so try it out for yourself and see what you like!

now, those tutorials combined are pretty all-encompassing, so some of the following may be redundant, but here are my personal tips:

unless you have no other option available, NEVER GO FOR FILES BELOW 1080p—i can't stress this enough. also, use screencaps instead of screen-recording, and don't skip frames.

if you gif with the video timeline, always drag your saved gif back into photoshop and fix the frame rate!! the first tutorial goes into this if you don't know what i'm talking about, but yeah, super important. i didn't do this until recently cause i was lazy and didn't think it made that big a difference, but since i've started taking that extra step i look at my previous gifs and think it's SO NOTICEABLE how much "choppier" they are.

sharpening is king. the settings shown on that first tutorial are a great base to start, and the second offers some more options, but i really encourage playing around with the amount/radius settings, as well as with checking legacy & accuracy on and off (which are shown when you click on the little cog icon in smart sharpen), to find a setting that you really love. some ppl like smoother gifs, others like theirs really sharp—it's really a matter of personal taste, so trying out those adjustments for yourself will help you understand how sharpening works and let you find your own preference.

all that being said, sharpening is not one-size-fits-all. depending on how something was filmed and lit, when it came out, how much grain there is on the file, etc, you might have to make little (or big) adjustments to your sharpen settings. this is why it's so important to understand how this tool works instead of just blindly inputting numbers.

the black/white eye droppers within the curves tool are your best friends. the first tutorial goes over how this works.

beware of vibrance and saturation. i personally never use vibrance, and saturation requires a gentle touch. overusing either of these tools can really destroy the quality of a gif—it pays off to build up your coloring by gradually stacking other adjustment layers.

channel mixer my beloved. i never used this adjustment at the start because i had no clue how it worked, but since i've learned by using it over time it's become literally my favorite tool for coloring—it can seriously work miracles.

a little noise can go a long way. sometimes messing around with sharpening still doesn't get your gif looking like you want it, quality-wise, and adding a noise filter can a) make your gif look sharper, b) make your gif look more uniform when the file has some annoying grain you can't get rid of, and c) just give it some personality! but this is totally a personal preference, as some people, like i mentioned, will want their gifs as smooth and noiseless as possible.

Thanks :)

this is how my psd looks for one of the gifs (each one requires different approach sometimes)

I tend to add several brightening layers, they look smoothly like that. Then colouring. Channel mixer makes wonders. Thanks @kiraslight for introducing me to it :) 

i was tagged by @myrcella to showcase before and afters of my editing process. thank you so much love! 💖 ngl i love seeing the evolution, it's low key fascinating.

i always use psds because, let's be honest, i'm a lazy ass bitch and i can't do it from scratch but, i edit them A LOT. i remove layers, change opacity, etc... also, i changed a lot how i color my gifs this last year, i grew tired of doing mostly b&w, it felt too repetitive. i wanted something new, wanted to try other things and that new size limit was a blessing. plus, i'm kinda happy with the colorings i've made lately ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ most of the gifs here are from my last edits, they are still on my laptop so that's why i chose them because i keep everything i do and then, once posted, i save them on a external hard drive and i arrange it by show/characters/otps. yes, i like to keep tracks of all the shit i do, don't @ me 💀