Crack Taken Seriously

PAGE ONE:

For most projects I pick a "base" panel grid for normal pages that don't need extra emphasis. For Saachi, that was a 6 panel grid. I made a digital template to drop in every page. There are easy variations that include an establishing shot (single tier on top, middle, or bottom). Shifting the gutters to give some panels more space. Occasional 3 panel tier. Dropping panel borders.

4 tiers-used for a specific character or when Saachi is uncomfortable.

9 panels- used for phone calls and hard, wordy conversations. I like to alternate characters in 9 panel grids to create a checker pattern.

In grids I also like to alternate close-ups with medium or long shots on diagonals or patter speaking characters on diagonals.

Fantasy pages! Some pages contains stories, daydreams, or poems and these break out of the grid entirely and often have no borders!

PAGE TWO:

I use a large panel on top with just two below, or two on top and one below, when introducing a new setting- big establishing shot

The fight scene gets diagonal gutters- rare.

A fairy tale gets rounded panel borders.

Sometimes I "shrink" the last panel on a page at the end of a scene to transition to a new setting. Two times I used 4 tightly packed panels in combo with border-less panels in storytelling-mode.

There are only 5 full page images in the book. First & last are in the "real world" and the middle 3 are in Saachi's "poem world"

Most used Saachi page layouts- 181 of the 253 pages fall into these 8 categories:

85- 6 panel grid but with adjusted size

52- even 6 panel grid

20- even 3 tiers

5- full page

5- even 4 tiers

5- square 4 grid

5- establishing shot either above or below an even 6 tier grid

BRIGHTNESS & CURVES

the most obvious and probably the most widespread (i think) thing is that when you originally screencap a show/import a video into photoshop, it's kinda dark. it just looks nicer to most gifmakers when we make it a little brighter. the issue with that can come when we do too much with our curve or brightness layers.

(the little circles show shades that i picked with the color picker tool at hopefully pretty much the same spot for all four gifs)

so you can see that i'm a bit of a hypocrite - i made her lighter with my standard psd! that's why i say that i personally think this is a matter of degrees. as far as i'm aware the difference between the unedited and second gif that shows how i usually color is within the margins. it's still fairly vibrant and brown whereas with the two lower gifs i'm firmly in pink/light beige territory (which is not sepideh moafi's skin color).

this one's pretty easy to avoid, in my opinion: just don't go too far with curves or brightness. i try to keep it in that margin that still approximates the color of the unedited version.

THE BLUES & GREENS

i feel like this is the most complex one. like i said, the pitt is a show with a lot of blue in the background and what can happen is that in trying to make those colors pop or reducing reds & yellows, we distort skin tones maybe a little too much.

layers this can become an issue in: selective color, color balance, levels, channel mixer, hue/saturation.

how i try to avoid this:

selective color: the red & yellow tabs of selective colors are crucial to me here. in those, i try not to increase the cyan or decrease the magenta or yellow too much -> of course it depends on the scene! if it's a very yellow scene, i can probably decrease the yellows of red or yellow without running the risk of actual whitewashing

levels: i usually keep my hands off the individual color levels for this - that's just a personal preference, though. if used, i'd apply the rules of color balance and channel mixer

color balance: i pretty much only use "shadows" and "lights" for color balance and here i try to take care with the cyan/red slider (and in some rare instances the yellow/blue slider) -> too much cyan and i create that pink-ish hue in the spots where the light hits the character, and that doesn't really belong there; with other characters too much cyan almost bleaches them out

channel mixer: no increasing reds in the green or the blue channel, basically

i made another example for this in combination with increased curves/brightness:

VIBRANCE

i don't see this one as often anymore because the pale gif trend was years and years ago (and personally, i'll never participate in it again bc i didn't like it), but for completion's sake i wanted to include it because pale gifs had a HUGE whitewashing problem.

as you can see, victoria looks sort of grey and ashy in the bottom two gifs. if you add more brightness/curves on top of that it becomes very, very pale which was sort of the trend for a while.

again, easy to avoid because i have to add a hue/saturation or vibrance layer and drag the dials into the negatives.

PALE COLOR GRADED/LIGHTING SCENES

sometimes the show does the deed itself, although i'm not super sure if that can still be qualified as whitewashing. in any case, sometimes i'll load screencaps into photoshop and go, "why does she look so pale??? i've giffed her before and she didn't remotely look like this."

at that point, i come to kind of a crossroad - do i try to color correct in addition to my usual coloring or do i just proceed as normal and go off of the skin tone presented to me in the scene?

i skew towards the latter... the top two look bad To Me but i don't know if there's an actual right answer to this conundrum, to be honest.