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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: – My basic gif-making tutorial – My color manipulation tutorial via usergif – Anime gif sharpening tutorial by aq2003 – How to load and use actions

I should preface that I always gif footage that's 1080p or 4K. For JJK, it's always 1080p!

MY SHARPENING SETTINGS: Firstly, shoutout to the tutorial above by aq2003 where I learned the minimum and surface blur filter trick! My sharpening actions use some of these tips mixed with my usual sharpening (with some slight modifications)! Here are my settings (click for higher quality):

Also, I will very rarely increase the first sharpening radius to 0.4. I've only had to do that, like, twice when giffing anime.

Here's how I used these actions in the Nanami gif:

I typically only use Anime (Sharpen) since my usual anime gifs are small 268px wide gifs. But occasionally, depending on the scene and gif size, I'll duplicate the gif and use Sharpen + Thicker Lines set at an opacity between 40-60% if I want the black outlines to look smoother. I only use Sharpen + Thicker Lines at 100% opacity for chibi scenes (like the Yuji gif in the preview gif above) where the outlines are already very thick.

The differences between my actions and the tutorial I linked by aq2003 are my sharpening settings and that all of my filters' blending modes are Normal (whereas they used Darken on their sharpening filter).

MY COLORING AND DARKEN ACTION: I'm not going to go too deep into coloring since my basic gif-making tutorial covers my usual steps, as does my color manipulation tutorial. My goals for anime gifs are to accurately represent character skin tones (especially taking care to NOT whitewash or color-wash, especially pink-wash, their skin tones since many anime characters are characters of color) and to feature vibrant backgrounds/accent colors.

Two of the first adjustment layers I do for almost every anime gif are Levels (to darken) and Selective Color (to lower the white levels). I only do this for very bright anime scenes, which are many of the scenes I've giffed in my experience. Please note that my darken action won't suit every scene without tinkering with them yourself, and it definitely shouldn't be used on already dark scenes. You'll either need to lower the opacity of the layers or play with the sliders yourself.

For example, the Nanami gif was VERY bright (almost over exposed) and uses my darken action as is:

The Choso gif is also very bright AND washed-out; it needed both darkening and color correcting:

Notice the color sliders are also adjusted in Selective Color, Whites. This was to bring color back to Choso's skin which had been washed out due to the fluorescent lights in the Shibuya train station.

Here are some additional color-correcting adjustments I made before continuing on with my usual coloring process:

(Note that there were several more adjustment layers after these before I landed on my final Choso gif in the preview.)

The Yuji gif is already at a good level and didn't need darkening, and I actually even brightened it a bit and increased the blacks:

That's as much as I'll explain about the basics of my anime colorings! Everything after these darkening steps follows my usual routine as laid out in my basic gif-making tutorial, even for dark scenes.