#userlyrae

I use KMPlayer to get my caps, and for the Sequel Trilogy at least, I broke down and downloaded extremely high quality copies (they're about 8gb per file), but this is not necessary. Many of the files I use for my gifs are anywhere between 2gb to 3gb: they're not always the clearest, but they work and they're not a requirement imo, it's just that I love seeing all the details in the sequels (and for TROS, it's necessary in order to gif the sand burrows sequence).

Once I load my caps into Photoshop, I crop my gif. Photoshop is helpful, where they actually have presets for the dimensions you can use. Any of them will do, but if you're setting out to make a mobile header, you'll want to go with the 16 x 9 setting.

For the sake of this tutorial, I'm sticking with my tried and true 2x3, though. The next thing I do is resize it, Tumblr's width dimensions right now are 540, so I always go with that for the width of my big gifs.

Now, what I've learned is what you choose on the drop down menu, will impact how your gif looks. For a brief period in time, I was using billenial, but I didn't like how it made my gifs look (I think they were coming out fuzzier in a way I disliked), so I always select bicubic (best for smooth gradients).

To me, this tends to make the gif look smoother, anyway, once I've resized it down.

Now, from here I fucking cheat, lmao. I made an action years ago to deal with the technical aspect of animating a gif cos I still get confused by that, so I click that until it goes to the portion where I need to start sharpening my gif:

As you can see, I have a few actions saved for sharpening: it's cos depending on the quality of the file I'm working on, I'll shift how I sharpen it to make sure it doesn't lower the actual quality of the gif. Right now, though, my primary sharpening settings are this:

My first smart sharpening layer:

Then, I have a Gaussian blur layer. Since I don't want the gif to be too blurry, I have lowered the opacity of this layer to ensure it doesn't overwhelm the gif itself:

And then I do one last smart sharpening layer, with these settings:

Now that the sharpening is done, I can move into the coloring stage! The first thing I do is I try to brighten up the image/gently color correct. The easiest way to start this is by using the white point color dropper in the curves layer:

What you'll do is look for the brightest corner of the image, click on it with this tool, and it'll color correct for you. This step involves a lot of trial and error, and sometimes I scrap it altogether and use exposure and channel mixer for more control on the outcome of the coloring.

I clicked on the white walls to the left of Rey, and that worked fairly well in terms of coloring. It's a tad more red leaning than I'd like, so I lowered the opacity of that layer to 74% (I always lower the opacity on the "fill" area rather than the actual opacity, cos I'm curious like that), and then I took the white line in the curves box, which designates the lighting/shadows, and I pulled it down a bit to give it a more natural look.

From there, I always add a levels layer: it's great for adjusting highlights and shadows in my opinion. I always bump up the white pointer until I'm happy with the brightness, and then I lower the black pointer until the gif has the depth I want (but not too much, cos I'll go back and edit it with selective coloring later). Depending on the gif, I might use the grey pointer in the middle, which brightens the overall gif, though it's not super often this is necessary.

Now, Rey's still looking a little too red for my liking, but I like the overall brightness of this gif (so far), so I'm gonna get into the weeds of working on the actual coloring. My first trick is adding a vibrance layer:

Lowering the saturation is a great way to get rid of any orange hues on a characters skin, while vibrance adds a (normal) level of color to their skin and doesn't make them look like a corpse, basically lmfao. I actually learned this trick through this wonderful anti orange-washing tutorial, which if you're giving any characters of color, is critical reading.

So now I move onto selective coloring, this one's a very play at your own leisure thing. I tend to work the most with the Reds, Neutrals, and Blacks, to tweak the coloring to get the result I want. This is what my settings look like so far:

There was some pinkish areas in the canvas (near Rey's hairline, her shoulders, and obviously her mouth) so I went ahead and messed with the magentas as well - selective coloring is probably the most important part of any of my gifs, not only does it help me get the tint that I want (or help me remove any tones that I don't want), it's also my primary tool in avoiding whitewashing, next to the vibrance tool - if I were giffing Poe or Finn, there'd probably be at least two or three additional selective coloring layers to make sure their skin tones were the right shade.

So, right now our Rey gif is looking like this:

Which is honestly fine, but I want the background to be a little less neutral. So I'm adding a channel mix layer, and going to the blues: from what I can tell, the lights behind Rey are a bit greenish in tone, so I'm gonna add more blue to the greens in the image:

Now, this made Rey's face a bit more cool/pink than I want, so I'm gonna add another selective color layer, and add more yellow to the reds:

There's still not as much depth to the gif here as I'd like, so I'm gonna add a little more to the neutrals and blacks:

Honestly, we could stop here, but I want to add a little more brightness to the gif (not much), so I'm gonna add a brightness/contrast layer:

Now that I'm satisfied with how the gif looks, I'm gonna run my action to change the speed the gif plays at to 0.05 (PS automatically sets it to 0.03 which is like watching the scene on fast forward), and our result is this:

And that's my usual process! I've gone through many "style evolutions" across the years with my coloring, so my biggest piece of advice is to just go ham fucking wild. Experiment, figure out what works for you: there was a time where I relied on photo filters to color correct my gifs and I used that for almost two years! Then I moved onto color balance for almost a year, I think, until I quit liking how it looked and I landed on my current method.

My other piece of advice is to look up as many giffing tutorials as you can find. I'm only as familiar with all these tricks because I'm constantly reading other people's tutorials and experimenting with their tips and tricks, blending them together until I find my own rhythm. @usergif has a directory of gif tutorials that I frequent often tbh!