HOW I COLOR DARK SCENES — A TUTORIAL

AKA how I get from this:

to this:

Before you start this tutorial, here is some things you already have to know or be able to do:

1. Basic knowledge of how to make gifs including where to get footage, what quality to use, how to screencap or import videos into frames, how to use Timeline and how to sharpen gifs.
2. Basic knowledge of how to use Photoshop layers and what they do including: Curves, Selective Color, and how to set opacity of layers.

Note: If you are unfamiliar with my technique, here is a link to a different tutorial by @thepunisher, who introduced me to this technique ages ago! Have a read through, if you find my own explanations confusing! 

The rest of this tutorial will be put under cut as it is extremely long because I take the time to explain what each layer does and why I chose to do it.

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oh thank you! i used Marion Regular, 15 pt

i dont make video edits, but when i was first starting out with gifs, i found that chaoticresources had a lot of good tutorials for people with different levels of understanding of photoshop!

some of the pointers i can give you are

• your first few gifsets are going to be really, really, bad. but that doesn’t mean you should stop!! you’re learning a whole new skill so naturally, you’re going to need practice.
  
• don’t be afraid to ask your favourite gifmakers for help or tutorials! i do this with my friends too when they coloured a scene really nicely and they’re really nice about it and they’re going to be really flattered, i assure you
  
• when posting sets, you should tag blogs that track tags for more exposure. for example, i track #usermeri, if you want me to see and reblog your gif, you can tag me! other source blog also track tags, depending on what fandom you’re planning on giffing!
• be sure to use the correct gif dimensions so the gif won’t be blurry

i dont really know what else to say that other gifmakers haven’t already said! if you have more questions, don’t hesitate to ask <3!

oh its not stupid at all! under the cut bc i kinda went off jfghdhgjf

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hm ! these days i make sure that the colouring will at least look like it matches up! i hate it when theres too much different colours (hues or in the background) because i think it looks messy. i avoid going too vibrant with it esp  if its a character set bc if it doesn’t have a specific theme/colour (like lets say rainbow or colour sets) and you instead just have a lot of colours clashing together, my eyes dont know where to focus and i end up hating my set. thats a personal preference tho! don’t live by my word bc everyone has a different taste!

also, when i make character sets, i dont exit out of the tab immediately because i know for sure that im going to want to go back to it! i dont save psds bc i just make the colouring look the way i want it on one go, but if i put the gifs all together and one gif looks like it doesn’t belong, i go back and fix some things up i.e. colour balance, add contrasts etc

gifset in question

since each scene was coloured differently, i’ll give you a few tips on how to approach certain scenes because one technique may not work for most

tips under the cut:

it’s super important to choose scenes that already have the colour you want, or a colour that can be easily converted into the colour you chose. for magenta, those colours are blue, cyans, and reds

each gif were coloured differently, and i only used the gradient map technique on the second gif since the scene was monochrome:

for the others, i for the most part used hue/saturation to remove other colours other than magenta/pink.

now, before using this, i strongly advise you to make the unnecessary colours look as close in colour, in this case, it will look more “one” instead of it being pixelated

that little hand thing is really useful when you’re trying to desaturate a certain colour to make your chosen one the only remaining one (magenta in my case). sometimes this will look patchy. a nice way to avoid that is to also play around with the lightness and hue.

sometimes, it’s best not to go all the way down because that usually will bring out pixels instead of it looking uniformly monochrome:

this is what it looks like when i had the saturation and lightness all the way to -100. pretty disgusting if you ask me!:

using the same hue/saturation layer, i also touched the Hue under the Reds tab to make it more magenta. the colour doesn’t have to be the perfect shade immediately, we’re gonna work on that on the next layers.

i added another layer of hue/saturation to make the magenta more vibrant:

and since there was still a little bit of blue in the background, i finished off with a last layer of hue/saturation and used the hand thing again and selected a point in the background that was blue and played around with the settings:

so thats one of the techniques i use pretty often!

so this last technique = is super helpful when a particular area is reaaalllly hard to manipulate

for this scene, i used the hue/saturation technique i explained above.now, i don’t really like the magenta thats being reflected inside the rest of the ship, and since its the same colour as the one im aiming to get, i cant just desaturate it to get rid of it.

so what you do it create a new layer, pick out the brush tool, and paint over the coloured parts you want to get rid of with black:

set the blending mode of the layer to Hue and the colour on the parts you coloured it in should be gone!:

(its sloppy bc im too lazy to acc fix it ok sfjdghf)

the Hue blending mode should also work with saturating a certain area of a gif! example:

the background has tinges of reds and yellows and im too lazy to mask everything and try to make it one colour, so what im going to do it use the eyedropper tool and pick an are in the background that matches the majority of the green, and paint over the parts i want to turn green

and set the blending mode to Hue

the results will not be entirely perfect, so you might want to play around with the brush and eyedropper tool and keep painting it different shades of green until it looks right like i did above. the end result of my layer ended up looking like this

so that’s really all i can think of! that’s the basics of what my process looks like and i cannot stress this enough: these are situational, they will not work for everything

omg thank u so much !! 

when something like that happens, it’s usually because you brightened it too much, too fast. go back to one of ur first brightening layers (be it levels, brightness, exposure, etc) and try to adjust them (by adjust i mean lower) until the pixelated area isn’t too apparent anymore. also, changing your saving settings, that helps a little, if the pixelated area isn’t too harsh.

oh i just used a lot of curves layers and painted over the parts that i couldn’t turn white. it was a pretty long process bc i painted it frame by frame since it’s a big gif so you will notice if it’s jut a single paint layer

omg thank you so much!

honestly i wish i can give you a specific tip, but every gif is made differently.

however, some essential adjustment layers are hue/saturation, selective colours, colour balance, and vibrancy.

if you wanna manipulate a colour, be sure to make the colour more uniform too (i.e make it all cyan instead of blue and cyan) so when you change it, all the colour will look more consistent

gifset in question

okay im gonna put it under the cut because it’s pretty long

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