#yeahsources

I. BASE GIF first of all, it's important to have a solid base to work comfortable. starting with the closer scene or the 'background' one is up to you. it's all about trial and error and see what works best according to the scenes you have. for the rumi blending, i tried various scenes before choosing these two. so, i created a black layer and move my first rumi above it.

II. BLENDING for this part, i duplicated my second rumi (the closest one) and chose screen blending. after that, i created mask layers: click in one of them and then click the button next to the fx button at the bottom of the layers panel. this will allow you to manipulate which parts of the gif are visible and which ones are not. now, click on the layer mask (the white square in your gif layer) and grab the brush tool. set it to a 200px or 300px soft brush. painting the gif with either black or white will 'erase' parts of the gif. white is 100% and black is 0% ending up with something like this.

III. COLORING to start adding color, I created two gradient maps, one in pink tones and the other one in b&w. then, by right clicking in each of them, I created clipping masks.

after this, I started adding multiple layers and with a soft brush, took different pink tones similar to the ones I used in the gradient map to color the second gif (the closest rumi) trying different blending modes in each layer! this is all about experimentation, what works best for your gifs, scenes, etc. for this one, I did four layers, choosing hard light, color, screen and lighten.

finally, I added my coloring and an extra vibrance layer (+40 only in the first slider)

IV. RESULT Add the texts and the png character, and that's it! (っ‘ω`c)

After loading your files into stack and cropping it to the desired size, select all frames and layers...

And change it to a video timeline by pressing this little icon

then select all your frames and convert to smart object

Now with your smart object selected, go to filter > sharpen > smart sharpen

with these settings...

and i like to apply twice to get a better result:

And just like that your gif will be perfectly sharpened. It may change depending if you're working with different type of media (such as animation) but these are the general settings