Photoshop Tutorial | How to color dull gifs (jdramas coloring)

How to color dull gifs (jdramas coloring)

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Coloring jdramas and cable channel kdramas is pretty frustrating works because the gifs always come out dull and dark, a very unattractive combination. 

But brightening the gifs and giving them a more "angelic" vibe, mostly requires patience and lots of lots of gradients.

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For this tutorial you will need basic gif making knowledge:

(here have some todapi. gifs of Erika Toda and Yamapi )
This are some finished products, if you want to see how dull the gifs were before, take a look at these screencaps.

Original:

Let's begin:

Start with your basic gif.

1) Add a gradient.

I am adding a blue to white gradient fill 

because i want to enchance the colors of the

ocean in the gif.

Set this gradient fill to soft light.

2) Rasterize gradient & Erase

if you don't know how to rasterize the gradient,

you can simply click the eraser

and then click the gif screen

then it will ask you to rasterize the layer

click yes

you have to rasterize or else it won't let you erase

as for the erasing part

i'm going to erase the parts where the blue touches Erika and Yamapi

make sure you are using a soft-headed brush

my brush's opacity is set to 60%, 

so i can have an easier control on eraser

and still leave some of the blue color behind

as you can see here, the blue overlaps their faces which i don't want. so i need to erase in these areas

3) Add curves

( to brighten image)

my curves are the usual upward slope shape

but make sure to adjust your curves to your gif's own needs

4) Add another gradient

This time it will be a white to transparent gradient fill

Keep its layer mode on normal, but lower its opacity to around 50%

do the same as the blue gradient fill above

and erase places you don't want it to be

5) And another gradient

i'm adding a white to brown gradient fill

(or you could do brown to white and set the angle to -90 degrees)

because i want the rock's colors to show up more

rasterize / erase the parts you don't want the fill to overlap

for example. i will erase where the brown color touches Erika & Yamapi

6) Hue and Saturation

Simply tweak the colors 

increase the lightness of the colors you want more noticed

and decrease the lightness of the colors you don't want noticed

if you want to change to hues of the some colors

go ahead

in my case

i tweaked the blue to my liking

Final Product: