Animation: A Guide
I was initially having trouble pinpointing exactly what I do often enough to warrant putting in an overall "guide" to animation, but after working on some of the tutorials in this post, I've come to notice some of my patterns more explicitly. I'm not sure the best way to show them to you, so I'm going to start with a little basic "overview," show some examples, and then follow up with a specific tutorial or two so you can see things in action.
Sometimes the process will be incredibly simple. I honestly find it easier to overwork an animated icon than I do live action. When you start adding too many layers to them, they can get grainy or gross. Other times, there might be a surprising amount that goes into it to bring out all the color you can. I'll try my best so show you what I personally do. There's no ~set thing but I do have some things that I typically do quite a lot when coloring animation.
The main things I can say about my animation icons is that I like them BRIGHT, VIBRANT, COLORFUL.
One main thing that I'm noticing in my icons is a "glowy, vibrant" aspect. How I achieve this is as follows: Once I have my base ready, I duplicate the layer and set it to SCREEN 100%. I use Gaussian Blur set to around 2.5-13.5 (depends if I'm working on 100x100 or a larger canvas and how blurry I want it to be - play around with it and choose what you like!). Since I like bright, I often increase the saturation on this layer as well (Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation> Saturation +15-55). Then I duplicate the base, drag it on top, and set it to SOFT LIGHT 100%. This gives me a nice, slightly blurred/glowy image to start coloring on top of.
From here, I color in different but similar ways. Tools I use often:
- Curves: to slightly brighten the image
- Vibrance: I use it a lot, usually set at least to Vibrance +50
- Gradients: Most often black and white ones on SOFT LIGHT for lighting, but also sometimes colored ones for coloring, or colored lighting
- Gradient Map: Most often black and white on SOFT LIGHT set to a lower opacity to avoid flatness but the possibilities are endless
- Levels: Set to the default Increase Contrast (1, 2, 3) depending on how much contrast I want to add. This is often the very last layer I use, a final step to make sure I didn't wash everything out when adding textures, or other adjustment layers.
When I'm done coloring, there's another step I seem to do all the time right now. I stamp everything to a new layer on top, blur it a lot (13.5+), increase the saturation, and set that layer to screen or soft light, depending on how bright/dark the image already is. From there, I usually mask away the parts that cover the face/subject so it's not overpowering, and I may or may not lower the opacity. And of course you can continue editing above that layer if you need to change more things, too. I'll show you a few before/after examples here:
ORIGINAL > BLURRED LAYER W LAYER MASK (HOVER FOR SETTING INFO) > W APPLIED BLUR LAYER
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I'm going to go over this icon to show you a specific example of my ~process. It was a blend of these two images:
http://i.imgur.com/5o9ak.jpg / http://i.imgur.com/MFqp3.jpg
Now I don't have the original blend saved but I tried to quickly receate it since I do have a slightly prepped base saved that I can switch to after the first step. This isn't a blend tutorial but pretty much the only technique involved is masking the parts I didn't want and REDRAWING where necessary.
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So we start by taking our base image
And duplicate it once, set it to SCREEN. Duplicate the base, drag it on top and set it to SOFTLIGHT. This brightens the image and gives it more contrast. This is a step that I always do, to every icon. Sometimes I might blur the screen layer a little as well, but I didn't this time.
This is a case where I think the base really needs a lot of work. The first thing I often do after the basic prep, is use CURVES to brighten the image a little more. Nothing drastic because I don't want the image to get washed out. In your Adjustments tool bar, add a CURVES LAYER. In this case my settings were Output 135, Input 118.
The next thing I did was add a Vibrance adjustment layer, setting Vibrance +65, Saturation 0. For this icon, it basically just serves to bring more color into the lighter parts of his shirt and the sparkles. A lot of other times I will use more Vibrance but it wasn't necessary in this case. Most of my icons have a Vibrance layer on it (usually to +100 tbh) but the same thing could be achieved by upping the saturation if your program doesn't have that tool.
Next I wanted to add more blues to the icon. I added a new Color Balance adjustment layer, and in the midtones sections my settings were -33, -5, +43. This brings up the cyan, blue and just a hint of extra magenta. I also did NOT want their skin and hair to get too blue, so using a soft round brush on a low opacity, I roughly masked/erased the parts of the Color Balance layer on their skin, hair, clothes.
Next I added this gradient on SOFT LIGHT 100%
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This is something I do in pretty much EVERY icon. It's not always this gradient, I use the Gradient Tool fresh each time to adapt the amount of lights and darks I need, but a black and white gradient I find helps give the icon depth. As soon as I added the gradient to this icon, I felt it really started to look better for the first time. The colors are no longer flat, but fade in different shades. This is essential to me.
While I was messing with gradients, I also took this one
by endearest
and set it to SCREEN 38%. This brightens the shadows and lightens his hair, but keeps the blue tone I liked about it.
I wanted to continue to build depth in the lights and shadows so I took this texture
(by unknown) set to SOFT LIGHT 32%.
I didn't like how dark it made his hair/shirt area so I masked some of it away using a soft round brush. You can see the parts I took away here in yellow (NOTE: the yellow here is in no way part of the icon, I'm just trying to help the reader visualize exactly what I masked away)
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At this point I merged all my layers onto a new layer on the very top by hitting Command+Option+Shift+E (or, I believe ctrl+alt+shift+E on PC, but I'm not positive). We're going to blur this layer by going to Filter>Blue>Gaussian Blur> Setting 13.5. Up the saturation of the blurred layer by going to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation> Saturation Setting ~53. You should come out with a layer that looks like this:
Set it to SCREEN 100%. This is what you get:
Now this looks bad! Everything is way too light, too washed out, too blurry. Not good. So I'm going to mask away the parts I don't want again: covering their bodies/faces/hair/etc.
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Much better.
Now I need more contrast. To achieve this, I used Levels. New Adjustment layer>Levels> Choose Increase Contrast 1 from the first drop down menu. In this case the Input Level settings end up being 10, 1.00, 245. Levels is my current favorite way of adding contrast. Black and white gradient maps set to soft light are also really good, but you have to play with the opacity quite a bit because it can drain color away. This is the result of my levels contrast layer:
I wanted Belle and the Beast~ to stand out even more so I made them darker with a Selective Color layer. New Adjustment Layer>Selective Color. The ONLY setting I changed was in the Neutral palette. In the drop down next to "Colors:" choose Neutrals. I only upped the blacks, so your settings would be 0, 0, 0, +17. This darkens the subjects but not the background in this case. Depending on your image, this won't always be true, but using Selective Color to increase the blacks in the Neutral part of you icon can be a good way to get it darker without changing other things. (If you don't have selective color, I'm not entirely sure what I can recommend, but I'd probably start with painting around on the parts I wanted to darken with BLACK and a soft round brush and set the layer to SOFT LIGHT and then go from there)
Now I used one final texture to deepen the blues even more. Once again I will mask away the part covering the subjects:
(by unkown) set to SOFT LIGHT 50% >
after masking >
Almost done! Merge layers to a new layer on top layer again (Command+Option+Shift+E). Sharpen that layer (Filter>Sharpen>Sharpen) and lower the opacity to 43%. This is how I always sharpen, by making a new layer, sharpening that, and then lowering the opacity of the new layer until I'm satisfied with how it looks. I like doing this because it gives flexibility - I can always go back and change the opacity of that layer if I later decide it still looks too blurry/too sharp!
At this point I'm almost done but I decided I wanted his hair to be more yellow than red. I added a Color Balance layer (New Adjustment Layer>Color Balance). On Midtones, make your settings 0, 0, -59. This will up the yellows. Mask the layer like so:
so that the rest of the icon remains blue/purple and doesn't get too yellow. I ended up wanting the hair even more yellow, so I duplicated the Color Balance layer once (total of two identical color balance layers on top).
And that's my finished product!!!
I tried to make a gif but I failed :(
So have my layers instead
I also wanted to touch on dealing with grainy, low quality screencaps. Specifically, Avatar caps because there are no HQ versions out there that I know of. Most Disney movies, and even the Legend of Korra, have really great quality caps (check out disneyscreencaps.com) now so image quality shouldn't REALLY be a problem for those anymore, depending on the movie/image.
Let's just work with this one for now:
It's really grainy, gross. There's not much you can do about it. One thing that I think really helps though is taking a hard, round brush at 100% opacity and literally PAINTING OVER THE GRAIN. It might seem tedious, but it's really not if you remember these few things:
* Grab the color dropper and take about a 5x5 average sample and just quickly go over the grainy parts
* Only hit the largest solid areas of color. For example in this cap, focus on her face, her fur coat, her hair, maybe the background. Don't go into details like her barettes, her lips, her eyes, the crevices in her clothing, etc. It's not necessary.
* It can be very roughly done. You don't have to get too close to the edges of each color, or into corners. It won't be noticeable when you make it smaller anyway.
* If you crop your image first, you can avoid extra work from painting anything you'll crop out later.
* It's absolutely not necessary for every cap, not every cap is especially grainy or low quality.
To show you my rough example, here's what I painted by itself:
and the difference:
You don't have to paint that much even, I think I tried to do a slightly better job than normal since I knew I'd be showing it to you guys lol. Now I colored it really quickly in a few steps just to get to an icon for this tutorial. I duplicated the base, set it to screen, blurred it using Gaussian Blur, and upped the saturation of the screen layer. Then I duplicated the base, dragged it on top and set it to soft light. I played with the lighting by adding a black and white gradient set to SOFT LIGHT, added a color balance to remove some of the overpowering blue. Finally set a black and white GRADIENT MAP to SOFT LIGHT at 53% to increase contrast and brightened it with a curves layer.
If you do a far away crop, the painting over the grainy parts step probably won't matter. But manually getting rid of the grain can help you get closer crops when you start with crappy caps.
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grainy vs smooth
I guess the difference is mostly in my head in this cap, it really doesn't look that bad! But I can definitely still see grain in the first and poor image quality is one of my least favorite things about image editing so I personally feel better taking the extra step and knowing that I didn't produce a LQ image. If you took this further and continued to add adjustment layers or textures or even sharpening it, the grain will only get worse. I prefer to start clean!
This is also GREAT if you want to do larger graphics such as picspams or tumblr images! Like this entire thing is repainted because the grain was insane. But now everything is nice and smooth. Here's an example of where I didn't do that, you can clearly see a difference in quality. Another solution is adding grainy textures yourself and pretending you meant it to look like that all along.
I was also asked about how to get Avatar/Korra caps vibrant without washing them out. And that's actually a key thing: not making things TOO bright. I've definitely done that in the past and things can turn into a muddled mess. Here's an example:
You can't see any of his features, the whole thing is a blurry too bright mess.
I'm going to use this icon as an example now-
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First I cropped the image, and painted over it with blue matching the water and redrew the end of the leaf stem. It will look like this:
I didn't resize just yet (you can right click>open image in new tab to see the full size), but instead duplicated the image, blurred it at about ~2.5 radius, set it to SCREEN ~78%.
Then I duplicated the base again and dragged it on top and set it to SOFT LIGHT 100%.
Then I finally resized to 100x100. The reason for the slight blur and working with it in a larger size first is because without it, I found that my lines were too sharp, too jagged. The minimal blur helps to soften the image and the hard lines out a little bit. Working on a larger canvas first can be really helpful in animation, but you do still have to be careful or you can end up with a product that won't look good when resized. What I typically do is do basic prep at a larger scale (crop, background extensions, screen+blur layer, and soft light layer) and then resize to add textures, lighting, sharpness, extra coloring or adjustment layers.
After resizing, I added a Vibrance layer, settings Vibrance +51, Saturation 0.
Next it was time for my beloved black and white gradient. This time I used this one:
and set it to soft light 100%. I decided I wanted to deepen the effect so I duplicated the gradient layer once and ended up with this:
Finally, I wanted there to be more texture to the background so I chose one in black and white that would add depth and texture but not change the color. This particular one reminded me of water color paint, so I chose it:
by lookslikerain
Set it to soft light 100% and end up with the finished product:
I think the key to not washing it out is watching your layers that brighten or add contrast. If you notice parts getting to bright, mask it out, or lower the opacity of these kinds of layers. You can always add darkness with black on soft light or selective color in neutrals or any other adjustment layers too.
For example this is what it could have looked like with an extra screen layer and a curves layer bringing up the brightness:
Sometimes less is more, and that can really be the case with animation. It wasn't better to add more layers lightening in here, it just made it lower quality, too bright, washed out and it looks sharpen than it was supposed to.
vs
I already mentioned earlier about how I always sharpen. In this icon, you'll notice I didn't sharpen AT ALL. It is really really easy to over-sharpen animated icons and get gross jaggedy lines. This icon, I thought, was already bordering on getting too sharp, so I left it alone and that's okay. If you do feel like you need to sharpen, I highly recommend stamping all your layers onto a new one, sharpening that new layer, and then lowering the opacity until you are satisfied. This will give you incredible flexibility with your sharpness. You can always mask away or take your BLUR or SMUDGE tool and go over any particularly jagged areas, or to smooth out graininess as well.
I don't really use a lot of textures on my animated icons. The same feeling I get of "incompleteness" on live action icons if I don't use at least one texture, doesn't seem to apply to animation. But I still want to leave you with a few that I really like working with. I'm kind of shit at keeping track who made what texture, so if I have any listed as "unknown" and you know the maker, I'd really appreciate it if you let me know so I can edit this with credit!
Favorite textures (that AREN'T just blurred layers of my base image lol)
lookslikerain - tinebrella - happy_harper13 - iqons - tinebrella
unknown - fuuurs - fuuurs - bijoou - innocent_lexys
innocent_lexys - tinebrella - fuuurs - fancifull - innocent_lexys
vetica - midnight-road - midnight-road - midnight-road - dekolette
lookslikerain - lookslikerain - erzsebet - erzsebet - erzsebet
erzsebet - eamesie - juanxyo - iconographer - drankmywar
slayground - slayground - planets-bend-between-us - realproof - shoqolad
I hope this was somewhat helpful. I've really never done a tutorial before (I get to add a shiny new ~tutorial~ tag to this community now yay), but I tried to go about it in an informative way. I definitely don't know what I'm talking about sometimes but this is a pretty accurate depiction of what I actually do in practice, even if I don't fully understand the theory! If you have any further questions or need clarifications, please feel free to let me know. Please also tell me if this was any use, since I think I have quite a few more specific tutorials to write from Ask the Maker requests and if there's anything I can do better, I'd like to know! All your feedback is very much appreciated :)
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