So you want to learn how to colour ehh? Well, you’ve come to the wrong guy. Seriously I don’t exactly know what I do, I sort of just do it.
but.. I can give you some tips and also tutorials from other people who I found their colouring to be nice.
Here are some tutorials which I found to be nice
http://kuruseidasu.tumblr.com/tagged/t
OK this one is not really a tutorial but it does give some advice for better colouring so no harm reading.
http://akashis.tumblr.com/post/88869707515/how-to-gif-and-color-anime
I started off with this one and this persons colouring is pretty good IMO.. Focus on what they are doing such as gradient maps and hue/saturation and you should be able to pick something up from them.
http://otoyomegatari.tumblr.com/tagged/colour%20tutorial
This one is from me.. it’s not a tutorial but rather a place to look if you want some PSDS and a guide about them. I would definitely recommend having a lot of PSD’s if you are just starting out and don’t know how to manipulate adjustments around in photoshop.
These are just some things I found to be useful getting started but they are really good for someone starting out colouring.
There are a couple of tips I can give you that I use pretty much for every gif.
First being I always start off using auto curves. Auto curves is a great way to neutralise and filters in you gif so you can colour it without trying to go against a filter that just wont go away. To do auto curves (if you don’t already it’s just simply clicking on curves
and then clicking on auto
Now auto curves wont always give you a drastic change as shown above but it does get rid of ugly filters that were on the gif.
Here’s an example of before and after using auto curves
You can see how the auto curves gets rid of this gray filter on top of the gif and equalises the gif.
If you use auto curves and it changes the gif drastically then I would suggest lowering the opacity of the auto curves to have to look more normal here’s a good example of what I mean
See how the auto curves completely gets rid of the darkness? In this case it is not very good as now it works against the colours of the original scene. Working with and towards the colours the original scene had is the best way to colour gifs. Because of auto curves you can now see these weird colours and artefacts in the hair and arm and it is not what you should working towards. In this particular scene it is better if you just keep some darkness and go to more warm colours instead of cold colours.
Here is the same auto curves but with the opacity turned down to 20%
you can see how it does brighten things up a bit but not too much that you are fighting against the colours in the gif from here you could add +3 black to darken some of it so you wont see the artefacts in the body and so on.
Now my style of colouring is not to be the most vibrant or colourful but rather try and make the colours look more HD. By that I mean try and keep minimal amount of grain/noise in the gif when I go to save for web. I’ll give an example
gif without any colouring
Gif with two different types of colouring
In this gif you can see how I chose to go down the route to work with the colours instead of going against them and giving the scene a more natural look to it instead of a saturated/vibrant look which works against the scene.
REMEMBER vibrance and saturation will ALWAYS make the most amount of grain in the gif when you go to save.
Also another tip is NEVER add you own brightness to a gif. Now you might think im crazy but your colouring should not need any layer of brightness in you gif. Auto curves adds it for you and if it does not then you DO NOT need any more brightness in the gif. Seriously, abusing the brightness will not make you gif look any nicer and it will usually do the exact opposite. Also adding brightness makes the skin colour vanish and they become like ghosts. Example
It’s pretty obvious which one has the brightness layer and you can see what I mean. Skin colour vanishes and everything becomes much much lighter than it has to be. This scene in particular isn’t even the worst offender. Imagine adding brightness to a scene which took place outside. Yeahh it’s painful to look at especially if the colouring was good before you added the extra amount of brightness.
Just another tip aswell is to add contrast to your scene. Now this might cause some problems if you over use it but usually adding 15-30 contrast on your gif makes the gif look nicer.
When you start off colouring your gif after you have added the auto curves and tweaked them (if necessary) and you start looking for the PSD you want to use, look for a PSD which looks similar to the scene you are colouring. Don’t go checking through all your PSD’s which might not even have the same look as your gif but instead look for the PSD which closely resembles your own scene.
Example:
This is the gif with just auto curves added on to it, look at how it looks neutral it is. The PSD I decided to go with is one that will make it more warm without losing its natural look.
See how I have worked with the scene. Using the right PSD with the right scene makes a huge difference in how it will look at the end.
There is not much else I can say.. colouring gifs takes time and practice and you will definitely not learn how to do it overnight (unless your a tensai which means genius for all you non Japanese speaking plebs. JK) Seriously go through all of your adjustments and learn what they can do, what does what and how you can achieve the type of colouring you desire. It’s a long and tedious practice I know but if you seriously want to learn then it’s the only way. There is no short cut to becoming better just practice.
If you want to make gifs like these..
Courtesy of ephrain.tumblr.com
Courtesy of jyro.tumblr.com
Courtesy of Panzoom.tumblr.com
OR BEST OF ALL
Courtesy of me
Then all you can do is practice, practice ,practice.
If you have not checked out my giffing tutorial then do so here
http://otoyomegatari.tumblr.com/tagged/gif%20tutorial
It might help you even more than this one.
Just a last tip and it is when you are saving you gif to web check you gif on both adaptive and selective before clicking save Example:
Gif on adaptive
Gif on selective
now you wont really see a difference from these two images but when you are making your own gif the differences will show up and you can see which one looks better.
Thank you for reading I hope you got something out of this (I know I didn’t as I wasted 2 hours making this tutorial which no one will really read) and good luck colouring.
Mangastream 