#psq

a little more thoughts about the bear edit (i'm assuming this is the post you're referring to, please feel free to correct me if i'm wrong) + if there is something specific you're looking for, it might be easier for me to answer:

scene choices - never underestimate what i'm willing to sacrifice for the color i am aiming for. i wanted the gifset blue so these scene choices were chosen specifically for blue backgrounds with little movement. with that, i sacrificed the # of frames, other scenes that might have matched the lyrics better, other scenes that i thought were prettier but I knew i wouldn't be able to get the blue i wanted etc.

masking layers - this works really well in combination of choosing scenes with very minimal movement. i was only able to bring out the blue in this gif bc carmy didn't move at all. which meant i was able to create a new layer > color the background in > set to soft light > erase parts i didn't like such as blue that covered faces

adjustment settings - as for which layers to edit, i always go through selective colors, color balance, brightness, and curves. with selective colors, if you're not willing to learn color theory (like me bc i'm lazy) then it just comes with messing around with the sliders. for instance, there's a lot of white in the original scenes of those gifs and i know that if i use selective coloring > white > the whites can be turned cyan. then i add another selective coloring > cyan > and ramp up the cyans in there. i also duplicate selective coloring layers multiple times. sometimes i'll end up with 3 of the same layers just to get a vibrant blue. this is how i achieved the blues for this gif. now, i would go back to those layers and use the mask layer to erase all the blues i don't like over carmy & syd.

We're going to go from the first cap to something reeaaaallly blue. I’m not gonna go through the whole curves, brightness, etc... because that varies from cap to cap, but I included a screenshot of ALL my layers at the very bottom. I will say, my usual routine is curves, selective color (just under the black color), brightness, and then levels. I’m very careful with the brightness and curves because I don’t want to whitewash. 

If I’m not lazy, I usually use selective color to bring out colors but I’m mad lazy 98% of the time so I just use a brush and color the background in. Create a new layer, grab your brush and your favorite vibrant color. I usually start with a big brush and low hardness the further away from the people  (size: 99, hardness: 10%). The closer I get to the people, I decrease my size and increase the hardness (size: 33px, hardness: 40%).

Once you have your colored layer, you can play with the mode. I usually do soft light because it looks the most “natural” to me, but this is just my preference. Hard light looks okay, but the blue is too strong for my liking. And multiply just looks really bad to me (AND i’m really too lazy to color their outline perfectly) and you can see that I didn’t color in everything that well.

Now that I have the color I like, I look at my caps and all the things I don’t like and want to get rid of. The main one is the dark blue on the right side of the cap -- it looks grainy to me and I don’t like how it darkens the right side of the cap. >:’D The left side is a little grainy for my liking also, and usually I’d use the soft blur OR duplicate > gaussian blur > and lower opacity & erase, but that’s a lot of effort for me right now, so we’ll leave it as is. 

So I added a new layer, used the eyedropper tool and grabbed a brush (size: big enough to cover that dark spot, hardness: 0%) and pressed ONCE in that corner, then set that layer to screen. And another layer set to normal, a smaller brush (hardness: 0%) and used an eye dropper tool again -- this time to choose a darker-ish color just to make it less one dimensional. I pressed once towards the bottom right.  Honestly, no one probably notices these things, but idk it just stands out to me.

That’s essentially the gist of it. Also, now that I have a VERY prominent blue layer, the selective color adjustment is MUCH more useful if you were trying to manipulate colors! Or if you really want to make your blues stand out more. Then I just sharpen, resize, add some other layers to tie it all in together (minor changes, really). Anyways, I hope this helped in some way and I showed all my layers for the final outcome below! :’) 

The idea is to make the background as white as possible so I have the gif on the left and we have to turn it into grey first

you paint it to whatever color is prominent in the image

and then with hue/saturation lower the saturation for red and bright it up as well, if that affects your main subject then use a mask layer (it would be the same if the prominent background was green, blue or any other color)

then add your regular coloring and by then the grey should look almost white because with your regular coloring you probably added curves, levels, etc

then add a solid color layer with whatever color you want to put as background and then select darker color for blending mode and that’s it