princesswan:

Hi! 🙂
Okay so… first of all the color palette meme is not an easy one. You need to know Photoshop very well and also need to be so accurate when coloring because the particulars make the difference.
And since you asked, here are some tips:
– You must have a good base psd: if the base doesn’t work like it should, changing the background colors is gonna be even more difficult. When I say “a good base psd”, I mean a psd that can brighten your gif and make it vibrant without making it look unnatural, but there’s a condition: too bright and too vivid can ruin the quality of the gif so you need to be well-balanced with the adjustments.
– Sometimes Selective Color layers aren’t that useful and they make it very hard to turn the background into a homogeneous color without ruining the quality of the gif. So do NOT think that Selective Color layers are always the right option. Same goes for simple Hue/Saturation layers.
– There’s one tool that not all gif makers use because it makes the whole process of coloring longer and maybe a bit more complicated, but I can assure you it’s absolutely worth it. I’m talking about the Colorize option you can find when adding a new Hue/Saturation layer. You just need to tick the box to enable it and the gif will instantly be colored in a very accurate, homogeneous and clear way. Here comes the complicated part: since the entire gif will be colored, you’ll need to erase, using a Mask layer, those parts of the gif you don’t want the Colorize option to have an effect on. If the subjects of the gif stay still, then it won’t take you that much time, but if there are particular movements, you’ll need to work on every single frame till you achieve your goal. Once you adjust it, you can play around with the Vibrance, Hue/Saturation, Selective Colors, etc… till you think the color is on point.
– Always try to put the gif you’re coloring on the actual color of the palette. You’ll easily understand if you’re getting close to the right tonality or not.
– Another useful tip is to pick the color you’re working on from the palette with the Eyedropper tool and brush it on the gif. That’s useful for 2 reasons:
1) you can make a very quick comparison of the two colors, the one that you obtained and the one that’s actually right.
2) you can decide to brush it on a new empty layer and set it on soft light, so as to make the color of the gif softer and more alike to the one of the palette, other than brighter.
– Dark colors are always harder to obtain, so don’t give up, it’s absolutely normal. You’ll just need to be very patient and a bit more accurate.
– NOT all scenes can be used for color palette gifsets. It can happen that a particular scene is just not predisposed to be colored in a certain way. Remember that exaggeration make the gifs look very unnatural, and that’s not what we want to obtain.
– A detail that can be considered secondary but that’s also very important: settings like sharpening can radically change how a gif looks and also affect the coloring itself.
– One last thing: a color palette meme looks nicer when it’s also aesthetically pleasing. My advice is to think carefully of the scenes you gif and the way you collocate them in the gifset. I always try to gif a close-up scene and a far-off scene which can be a scene filmed from afar or an object/writing. I believe it looks prettier that way, but maybe that’s just my opinion.

I really do hope this is useful. Anyway, I was asked to make a tutorial on how to make a color palette gifset, so I’ll be posting something more accurate very soon. I’m sorry if there are any typos or mistakes but I’m on mobile and English is not my first language. As always, if you need further information my ask box is open! 🙂