step 1: choosing your scenes. whether you're like me and record clips and load those into photoshop or you screencap, what i find to be (arguably) the most important part of this process is scene selection. the other part of most importance is knowing how to manipulate colors. (disclaimer that there might be other ways to do this type of coloring, but this is how i taught myself to do it!)

those two really go hand-in-hand with each other. oftentimes, i don't start out knowing what color combo i want to use. instead, i open the movie or episode in vlc and skip through it in ten second intervals (right arrow key) and scenes and particular images will jump out at me as i go. because it's freshest in my mind and i'm lowkey obsessed with it, i'm gonna use evil dead burn as my example for the purposes of this tutorial.

as a side note, i've found that going and skipping through (i like to think of it as speedrunning lol) a movie, i notice colors that i didn't really pay attention to the first time i watched it unless they're super obvious like this:

when i saw edb in the theater, i literally giggled at this scene bc it leapt out as being 1) an iconic shot to gif in general and 2) incredibly easy to manipulate the color. but i don't always notice how easily a shot will be easy to manipulate until i'm going through and clipping it for gifsets. here are some examples of shots that DID stand out to me:

and some that jumped out at me while clipping:

but before i continue, i want to break down why these are good examples for manipulating colors. while it's not always the case, i do tend to prefer gifs with minimal movement if i think i might have to use layer masks. this happens most often with faces/skin colors. for examples 1 and 3-5, the colors i want to fuck around with aren't the characters' skin but the colors around them -- blue, cyan, and an off-white and in this case. 3 is a bit of an outlier at the moment, but i'll go more in-depth when i get to the actual coloring bit.

in the case of examples 2 and 6, 2 is very similar to the very first image i shared, with the character silhouetted against a blue and red background respectively. with 6, this type of scene works great for sets like these as long as you're okay with knowing that anything you manipulate will also change the character's skin color.

basically, when i'm skipping through, i'm looking for scenes with distinct colors. it really doesn't matter what the colors are, just that they're easily manipulated. something like this doesn't work great:

it's not that they can't work (i used the second one in one of my edb sets with a lot of extra finagling), but they're largely all one color and that color is very neutral. the orange screenshot above is a lot more vibrant and can be manipulated with red and yellow where these two are kind of just greyish, something that is a lot more difficult to work with for me.

step 2: now for the actual coloring process! i am assuming basic gifmaking skills in this tutorial, but if you happen to need beginner tutorials, check out that tag on my resource blog. here's the base gif we're starting with (cropped and sharpened, but no coloring):

step 2a: base coloring. these first few layers are the adjustments i start virtually every single gif with.

first is a blank (unchanged values) brightness/contrast layer set to screen. this considerably brightens the gif and from the moment i saw this in a tutorial on coloring really dark scenes, it's been a literal game changer.

next is a curves layer. use the black and white eyedroppers (pictured to the very left of the screenshot below), one at a time. the way this works (and why it can be helpful when doing regular coloring of a heavily tinted scene) is by selecting the black eyedropper and then clicking on the blackest/darkest part of your gif. then do the same with the white eyedropper, instead clicking the whitest/lightest part of your gif. now, this gif is an outlier adn should not be counted bc the lightest part is still extremely red, so i just skipped over using the white eyedropper this time.

my third base layer is selective color. apply the adjustment and then select blacks from the dropdown menu. you'll see four separate sliders here. for blacks, i almost always just make them even blacker. it helps add more contrast between black and the rest of the color(s). on average, i usually crank the black slider up (toward the right) from +3 to +10 depending on the scene. in this case, it was +5. then, selecting neutrals from the dropdown, i typically lighten the blacks (moving the black slider to the left) in those anywhere between -1 and -4. the only thing with manipulating neutrals is that it can really lighten skin tones, so be very careful with this if giffing people of color! i went -3 for this one. and here's what our gif looks like so far (our coloring on the left and the og on the right:

not a huge difference, but we've brightened it up quite a bit and already the reds are looking more vibrant. now comes the fun part!

step 2b: COLOR MANIPULATION! *airhorns* my not so secret method with all these sets is utilizing selective color. i almost never use gradients with these sets and though there's one other method i use and will cover after this, i would say i do this 9.75 times out of ten.

the main thing with selective color is identifying 1) the color(s) you want to manipulate and 2) knowing how to manipulate them. i will say the latter half of this was something that took practice, but now i know it like the back of my hand. with this particular gif, because the color we're going to fuck with is red, that's the color we're going to choose from the selective color dropdown menu.

before going any further, i prefer to use a new selective color layer for each color i manipulate and color code them just for organization's sake. you could do this on the same selective color layer as the black & neutral one, but i don't like doing that lol. to color code your layers, right click on the box with the visibility eye on it and choose the appropriate color:

and here's what we start with for this gif:

what do the different sliders actually mean, though? the *magic* of these is knowing the colors and their respective opposites. cyan is the opposite of red, meaning that if you move that slider to the right, you will make the reds in the gif even more red. magenta is the opposite of green. moving this slider to the left will make your reds look more pink. yellow is blue's opposite. moving the slider to the left will make the reds more orange and moving it to the right will make the reds more purple.

unless i already know the colors i'm going for, i usually just start sliding shit around until i find a color i like while also keeping in mind that if this is going to be part of a duotone set, i will need more shots that either start out red or can be manipulated to be red or are at least similar to red. i ended up using this shot in my pink & green set and needed 3-4 other scenes that i knew i could be changed to the same pink. this meant finding other scenes with prominent reds, yellows, or oranges.

but before i get too ahead of myself, here's how i actually made the red into a vibrant pink:

i will say that most often, i am going all the way to one side or the other. moving them less "extremely" means the colors won't be as vibrant (but you can always add a vibrance/saturation layer after the fact too). here's how it looks after this layer with the og gif on the right:

i didn't save the psd for this set, but i'm relatively certain this is all i did with this particular shot. sometimes, i'll find that manipulating the colors can change the blacks and neutrals, so i'll add another selective color layer on top of this one, select black from the drop down, and increase the black slider a couple points just to increase the contrast again.

let's look at another example that doesn't start off red but still can be made to match this pink. i'm going to use the scene from the examples above, the one that's super orange. i add the same three base coloring layers, but i always redo the curves layer because what's black in the first gif may not be what's black in the new gif. here's what we're starting with (base coloring on left, og gif on right):

ultimately, here's what we need to do: orange -> red -> pink. orange is slightly more complicated to work with because it's in between two main photoshop colors: red and yellow. we'll need to adjust both to make the image actually red. here's what i did:

et voila:

oftentimes, i'll keep my first gif open and drag it so it's side-by-side with the next one i work on just to make sure i end up with the same (or at least very similar) pink. if need be, i'll add a magenta selective color layer and adjust those values so they match more closely, but these two are super close, so it's fine the way it is.

fun fact, i did use this shot in this pink & green duotone set, but i made it green instead of pink because i had enough red scenes already. here's how i'd adjust the base orange gif to make it that electric green instead:

to sum all this up, it's about 1) finding the right kind of shots, 2) knowing which color(s) to manipulate, and 3) how to turn those colors into different ones based on the main photoshop colors: red/cyan, magenta/green, and yellow/blue.

i would be happy to go over other examples if anyone has additional questions or if something is unclear, so please let me know if that's the case! i'm genuinely always happy to help to the best of my ability -- i just need to have the spoons to do so, so it might take a couple days as doing these tutorials does take a good chunk of time.

step 2c: now, earlier, i alluded to another method and i wanna quick go over that. this comes into play when you're working with either less vibrant colors or more neutral colors. this is kind of the perfect example (which is why i've used it in like 2 sets, made it my mobile header, and it may or may not be the header for my annual halloween event this year [insert grinch smile gif here]) with base coloring on the left and og on the right:

firstable, this shot made me giggle and kick my feet and twirl my hair bc 1) shining reference and 2) i just think it's neat :) but there are two main reasons why this particular shot works with this other method: there's very little movement and the door on either side isn't an easily manipulatable (is that a word) color like the other examples.

what i did in this case is add a new layer on top of the base coloring and set the blending mode to color. then i used the eyedropper tool on one of the other already-colored gifs and painted the door with that color. now, you can totally do this with like. any gif, but unless you're willing to either color frame-by-frame or fuck around with layer mask keyframes, you're gonna want something that doesn't move lol. i'm just not about that level of tedium. anyway, here's what this looks like once painted over (and cleaned up around the face with a layer mask):

the lighter/whiter the color you're painting over, the better/more vibrant this will be, so it doesn't really work to color over black bc your color won't show up. again, part of why this shot works so well. also for funsies, i made her iris that pink, too, but you can't see it in this example. this shot is also insanely versatile bc you can paint with whatever color you want. the possibilities are as limitless as hex codes :)

as a final note, some of my favorite individual gifs that have come out of these sets are ones that contain (or can be made to contain) BOTH colors i'm working with, like this from my midnight mass set linked above:

i was turning blues and cyans into purples and yellows and reds into orange/gold and there were quite a few shots that i already had clipped (reasons for having a 20tb hard drive to store everything i clip so i don't have to redo it every single time) that contained shades of all of those colors. i think that adds another level to a regular duotone set (which of course i still love!), having a gif or multiple gifs that contain both colors vs. having just purple and just yellow gifs. it ultimately depends on what kind of shots are at my disposal!

i think that's it? at least i can't think of anything else i want to add at this moment, but genuinely, if you have any additional questions about this type of coloring, don't hesitate to ask! i don't believe in gatekeeping when it comes to gifmaking 💙 that said, also reach out if you want me to walk you through anything else, even if it doesn't pertain to this! mwah!