Color Manipulation - Tumblr Posts

alright someone asked me a few weeks ago how i colored my gifs to make them colorful like this so i thought would make a simple tutorial on it! it's a relatively simple process and also assumes you know how to make gifs, including basic coloring.

before we get started, it's important to note that scene selection is the most important thing here and could make or break the way you color your gif. i highly recommend scenes/videos with cyan/blue-ish backgrounds (or even gray bgs with cool tones) as they don't interfere with skin tones and therefore will be much easier to color.

now that you've picked your scene, go ahead and make your gif how you normally would, but limiting the coloring to just the basics (aka lighting and color-correcting). here's how mine turned out:

and then the fun part begins! first, we're gonna make a new selective color layer and crank up the blue & cyan layers to make the colors really pop. i find that doing this first before doing anything else makes the colors more vibrant. here's how mine looked like, but you're free to move the sliders whichever way you want as long as you end up with a pretty even cyan or blue base to work with.

after that we can go ahead and add a hue & saturation layer. go into the cyan or blue tabs (or both depending on which colors show up in your gif, in my case mine is predominantly cyan with some blue shadows) and move the hue sliders to whichever color you prefer! you can play around with the saturation and lightness sliders too, but i was already satisfied with how the color turned out.

you can choose to stop here, but if you think it still needs a bit of color correction (especially if you have a subject whose skin tone needs a bit of fixing), go ahead and do that! here's how mine looks after that:

aaaand that's it! easy peasy. here are a couple more examples using the same process across different media:

i hope this made a bit of sense and is helpful, and if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask! 💗