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what is good sharpening vs oversharpening? im sorry if i have oversharpened anything i am to new to this

It's a great question! There are a lot of reasons that oversharpening is a problem and just one is that it causes intense colorwashing. Oversharpening introduces excess graininess that skews skin tones and accentuates stray highlights that can wash out a gif.

I want to preface this post with this: I am not here to shame anyone who is oversharpening.

The most important part of this answer is to bring awareness of why these basic steps of gifmaking are so important to the whole process.

Each of these gif pairs are uncolored, unedited, and has the same save settings. The only difference is the sharpening settings that are listed on each gif. The left side has my usual sharpening filters, and the right side has the filters that usually lead to oversharpening.

(Kate Sharma, Bridgerton, 2022, 1080p footage live action)

(Matilda, 1996, 1080p footage live action)

(Barbara Howard, Abbott Elementary, 2022, 1080p footage live action)

(Miles Morales, Into the Spider-verse, 2018, 1080p footage animated)

It's not a crime to oversharpen your gifs, but it does lead to the slippery slope of colorwashing (even for white people).

Look for the halo: If you look at the oversharpened gif of Barbara, you can see a yellow outline around her hair. That is an obvious indicator of going too far.

Use a layer mask to see what the colors were before sharpening: you can see in most of the oversharpened gifs above that there is a huge difference in the colors shown vs. in the less sharpened gif.

If you're working with older footage: don't try to overcorrect the graininess of the media. It's okay if some of it comes through!

Try to get the highest quality footage you can: I primarily work in 1080p files because my poor laptop starts to sound like a plane taking off when I try to screencap 4K files. If you're like me, look for larger file sizes. That will reduce the graininess of the gif.

Here are some links to different sharpening actions and guides: daenerys-stormborn action anyataylorjoy action anya-chalotra sharpening guide

These are great to use if you are starting out in Photoshop! (psst if you need a hookup lmk) I know some people don't use PS, and for them, I put my sharpening settings on this post. I think both of the action sets I linked above have similar if not the same settings.

Also, one thing I noticed when making the gif pairs is that the less sharpened gif was always a smaller size. Fixing sharpening settings might help people who are trying their best to keep things under the 10mb limit.

I hope this answered your question, anon. If anyone has any questions or would like other resources, let me know!

hi! I was wondering how you changed the background colour of a gif like you did for the first eddie gif in this tutorial (/post/718882826968334336/hi-alie-how-are-you-i-was-wondering-if-you-could)?

heyyy!

what i do is usually pretty simple: create a new gradient map adjustment layer, choose your colors, and select a blending mode that works the best for your gif. then with a soft brush in black, click on the layer mask thumbnail on that gradient map layer and erase parts where you don't want the color (like on characters). if the character is moving you can use keyframes, here's a good tutorial by @usergif / @fionagallaqher explaining keyframes for masking.

with the gradient map adjustment layer, you usually want the first color of your gradient to be black, and the second color to be the actual color you want.

you can leave the blending mode to normal/pass through if it works for you, or you can change it to color (or try other blending modes, see if it creates and effect you like). here are a few examples with the same black to pink gradient:

for this particular gif here, i've actually used a gradient fill layer because i wanted a gradient instead of one color. but i did the same thing: i chose my 2 color for my gradients, changed the blending mode to color, and erased the layer over his body with a layer mask. what's cool with the gradient fill layer is that you can use as many colors as you want, and you can also choose the actual angle of the gradient, compared to with a gradient map layer where you pick the one color and that's it.

the downside with the gradient fill layer is that the math is not the same as a gradient map layer, so it pretty much only works well when you choose the color blending mode. as you can see here it looks wacky with the same blending mode examples:

there are multiple ways to change a background, this is just two of them. here are more tutorials about changing a background's color:

hope this helps! ♡

hi ava, most talented gifmaker on tumblr!! first of all, obsessed with the gorgeous ted lasso sets you've been making <3 if no one has already asked and if you don't mind sharing, what's the larger font you used on this beautiful royjamie set? i'm a font hoarder collector and love the shape of the F lskjdfldskj. thank you in advance!! 🥰

I cannot believe one of the most talented people on the entirety of Tumblr dot com-org-gov just called me the most talented gifmaker. I am astonished. Confounded. Honored, obviously. But I, too, am a font hoarder collector (938 fonts and counting, and that's after getting rid of some recently) so I am always happy to share from my figurative vault.

It's called GIN Grotesk and I used the Rounded style.