#ps**

"Do you like books that contain photos of volcanoes? Are you deathly afraid of horses? And most importantly, would you like to kick back to some smoky jazz while gaming with me?

Hey there! I’ve received a similar ask, and I had yet to reply to it cause I’m so behind with replying to everyone due to lack of time, so if it was you, I’m so sorry!

Before I get into anything though, I’d like to say that…. you really shouldn’t let what all the other giffers say condition what you do. What works for others may not work for you, and if you’re happy with how your colouring turns out, what does it matter if it takes you a few more layers than other people? We all colour in different ways, and obviously tutorials and advices are super useful and they can teach you some stuff you had yet to discover and it’s always great to improve, but at the end of the day what’s important is the result and if you’re happy with yours, don’t pay too much attention to what other people say or do.

The thing I always stress about is making tiny adjustments, cause if you go super crazy with those, you just end up reducing the quality of the gif, by bringing out pixels.

How the hell do I only use 5/6 layers when I’m making tiny adjustments? Well, it depends on the layers you use and how you use them.

I end up using a couple more layers if I’m making a colour porn gifset, cause I abuse of selective colour, but generally I just use curves, brightness/contrast, exposure, selective colour, colour balance and photo filter. 

Out of all them, curves is the one that will impact your gif the most, and will make you lose less layers after, if you use it correctly. And by using it correctly I mean if you use the eyedrop tool with the white tip:

What this tool does is it turns whatever colour you click on with it into the whitest point of your gif, brightening everything accordingly. This is very useful especially if you’re giffing a dark scene! I’ve talked a bit about this tool here.

Everything is going to make more sense once you start using it, cause the more you practice with it, the more you get the hang of it! 

What you want to do once you click on it is to click on the lightest point of your scene. Keep in mind that it’s going to turn that point into white, so if you choose a dark colour your entire gif is going to look like crap. You want to choose as close to white as you can, but if you choose actually white, it’s not going to do much of anything at all. 

Now, you also need to keep in mind that this tool is going to affect the tone of your gif, based on which colour you pick, so if you pick a yellowish colour, it’s going to change the tone of the gif into blue, if you pick yellow it’s gonna make everything blue-ish and so on, going in the opposite way (so it’s very useful for those movies/tv shows that have a terrible yellow filter and such). 

Example:

if I were to pick that light green/blue colour behind harley (the red dot)

my gif would turn like this:

see? that colour turned into white, the gif was brightened accordingly, but since I chose a blue/green-ish colour, now the tone is reddish!

If I were to pick harley’s hair where it’s lighter instead:

I’d get this:

much better, right? 

A lot of this is trial by error. You’re going to need to click on a lot of stuff and undo it until you find a combo that works for your scene, but the more you use this tool, the more you understand how it works and the easier it gets!

Now you see why I would only need a couple more layers to be happy with my gif! And that’s by only using one tool, curves! Notice also how despite the fact that it’s a dark scene with shitty lighting, it got brightened straight away without bringing out pixels/lowering the quality!

Hey there :D

I sorted all my photoshop related questions, so you can find all my answers about colourings here. As for what I use the most, the answer is always curves.

Are you referring to using other people/downloadable psds? That’s always a bit tricky cause a colouring is usually tailored to a certain scene, so there’s always a few adjustments you need to make for it to fit your gif. 

Personally I always start from scratch, but if you prefer psds, you just need to see what needs twerking and what doesn’t:

brightness/curves/levels almost ALWAYS need to be adjusted to fit a different scene;

check if your gif has a cool or a warm undertone and if your psd matches that. If not, mess with colour balance or photo filter to counter the yellowish or bluish finish.

the above should usually fix problems with skin tones, but in case it doesn’t, selective colour -> red is usually the way to go!

Hey there! sorry about the late reply!

In terms of colouring I did what I always do, which is use curves!

I used selective colour -> red to try and get the same red tone in all my gifs, and I used selective colour -> white,  decreasing the black to make all the highlights “pop”. This is going to be more effective if you use selective colour in “absolute” rather than “relative”.

Short answer, I’m really fast and I have a very fast computer!

Instead of giving a long answer though, I thought I’d give a few tips on how I do it, since this is a question I’m asked quite often, so what the hell, I’m gonna share my wisdom :)

The following tips are very useful and will 100% cut your time on photoshop of a significant amount… Though I want to stress on the fact that it’s having a lot of RAM on your computer that’s going to make the real difference on how fast you can be. 

How to be faster when you gif:

I’m not sure how important it is to other people, but I’m very organized. When I’m making a gifset, I put the screencaps in different folders for how many gifs I’m making. That’s helpful for several reasons (it’ll be relevant a couple of points down too), but also cause I know how many more scenes I need to capture to complete my gifset, and I directly have a general idea of what the gifset is going to look like.

Related to that, I usually keep on my computer, on a pendrive and on a HDD the screencaps of some of the scene I use the most/I can possibly use in the future. They’re all in different folders, some named by character, some by fandom, some by episode, some by colour. This is very useful cause I don’t have to go and capture them again and again, wasting time. (Say, I gif Tony Stark quite a lot, I have most of his scenes already saved. It saves me A LOT of time!)

I use potplayer for capturing frames. Using that, or whatever app you have (I had kmplayer before) is way faster than using photoshop to do it.

I always capture the screencaps before I open photoshop. I usually keep the 2 phases separated. It’s mostly habit by now, cause my old pc was much slower than the one I have now, and this is especially helpful if you don’t have much RAM, cause as you know, ps runs on RAM, and will eat as much as you give to it. If you have other stuff open at the same time while using ps, it’s gonna make your pc and the whole process really really slow.

Following that, you can actually up the amount of RAM you can dedicate to photoshop! Go on Edit -> Preferences -> Performance! Remember not to overdo it though, especially if you plan on using other apps while you work on pc! I keep mine at 70% (so I have 10gb of ram dedicated to ps, now you see why I’m fast.)

Uploading screencaps as multiple DICOM files is much faster than loading files into stack! The main difference is that you can’t pick and choose which files to load, but you can only load folders (hence my putting everything into folders I said above!)

Now, the best advice that I can give you, the one that will change everything and really make everything so much faster: make actions, use actions!

Seriously! I’m the laziest person you’ll ever going to meet, so I made myself an action for literally EVERYTHING. Why? Cause a lot of the work we do on ps is repetitive and we end up doing the same things over and over for 8, 10, 20 gifs. Making frames from layers, setting the animation delay, resizing, sharpening…. It’s always the same things, but we waste so much time to input all those commands! 

I made myself an action for making frames and setting the delay. I have several other actions for resizing in the dimensions I use the most (like I have an action for 268p x 140p, one for 268p x 170p and so on). I have another action for sharpening. That means that the only thing I need to do is hit play and that’s it. In a couple of seconds everything is done and I have the gif ready so I can start the fun part: colouring it. 

I don’t know why but it always takes me way less when I use actions than when I have to input those commands by hand. A+++, best thing I ever started doing, would totally recommend you try it! 

I don’t have much time myself, love, that’s why I keep everything organized and ready to go, so I can gif on my breaks, and I don’t have to be more frustrated than necessary (and god knows how frustrating colouring can be!)

I have the advantage of having a pc and not a mac, so I can use potplayer directly and not waste any time converting my videos in acceptable formats that quicktime can read (kudos to mac users who spend so much time on that omg how do you do it!)

Ahahah, magic 🌼

Kidding! There’s actually a few ways to do that, I usually use one or the other, or a combination of all, depending on the scene and what I actually need!

Colour balance is one way to go. You can counteract the yellow of the gif, by upping the blue and the cyan (which decreases the yellows and the reds).

Photo filter is another way to go! Putting a cyan or blue filter (the opacity depends on the scene, by I try to keep it under 10% cause more than that it’s usually noticeable, and you can always put more than one layer, or use PF and then CB, build it up gradually.)

You can also mess with an entire colour with selective colour in “absolute” rather than relative. If you do this I advice you don’t go overboard with the adjustments cause the difference with relative is that moving the arrows even a tiny bit while on absolute makes a huge difference. so if you have a problem with yellow, you can go to selective colour -> yellow, and then decrease the yellow and up the cyan a little bit (or the red, depends on the scene).

But tbh my most used tool on that regard (and in general) is curves! More precisely the eyedrop tool in curves

Basically you click on it and what this does is that it turns whatever you click on the gif with it into the whitest point of your gif. This is especially useful with dark scenes cause it’s gonna brighten them up perfectly without bringing out pixels at all. But the best thing this thing does is that it inverts the tone of a scene. So if you click on a yellow-ish colour (I suggest you click on the fairest colour you can find on the scene cause as I said it’s gonna turn them into white and brighten everything else accordingly) it’s gonna turn the tone of the gif into blue-ish!

It’s gonna make sense once you practiced with it for a little bit cause it takes a few tries to get the hang of it (you’re gonna have to click on stuff a few times and go back a few times before you’re happy with the result) but it’s totally worth it, I promise! It makes you go from here:

to here: