#prrrraaaaaaaaaaaaactice

[antthonystark]

Hey! I love your gifsets!!!

hey thank you!!!

i’m not great at giving advice, but i’ll do my best! 

first of all, practice practice practice. there’s no way you’re going to get good without just.....doing it a lot. a lot of gifmakers will tell you that a lot of their process is really abstract and intuitive, because if you work at it enough, you’ll start to really get an eye for certain things like colours and lighting and stuff, and for the gifs that have more fancy colouring or blending or whatever, you can literally look at a scene from a show and know what’s possible to do with it and what isn’t - so there’s no substitute for practicing! 

that said, of course, you don’t have to go at it alone. i wouldn’t be able to do half the shit i do and have done without the benefit of tutorials. there are a lot of photoshop blogs that collect resources and tutorials for graphic and gifmakers that are insanely useful (such as yeahps and itsphotoshop, off the top of my head). they’re well organized blogs and you can go through and find the right tutorial for the type of thing you want to do. 

i mean, a lot of gifmaking for me came from picking up skills from tutorials and such, and now i just.....really i just mess around with what i know until something pretty comes out of it, to be honest. i still sometimes reference tutorials for certain things. and honestly, if you see a gifset you like, you can always ask the person who made it for a guide or tutorial about it! people have asked me a couple of times (and you can feel free to as well!) about specific gifsets (i have a tag for ps tutorials i’ve done upon request here, if you’re interested!)

and like i said, once you pick up a skill from someone, you can apply it in myriad ways and combinations to make pretty things! 

as for anything more specific than that, i would love to help if you have more specific questions! generally speaking, i would just advise to play around with everything. specifically: textures, different blending modes for layers like soft light or lighten or overlay (these can be for textures or images or even if you want to overlay gifs ontop of each other - lighten/screen is best for the latter; or even for colour fill layers to add pretty colours to gifs), different adjustments like gradient maps and selective colour and colour balance (also for making ‘pretty’ colourings), etc. honestly, i feel like this is really derivative advice, but just play around until you get the hang of it! 

and lastly, try not to compare yourself to other people (this is hard for me too) and definitely don’t measure your worth or value as a creator by the amount of notes you get. it can be discouraging starting off as a gifmaker and getting a lukewarm response when other people are getting 1000s of notes, but here’s a secret: amount of notes doesn’t correspond to the quality of your work. i’ve seen gifsets with many thousands of notes that are (no offense to the creators lol) just as good or sometimes even worse than a gifset i’ve made that has like...200 notes, but i don’t really care (well, not that much lol) because i know i’ve made something good, and maybe i just don’t have as many followers or not as many people saw it, or there’s not as many people in this particular fandom. i know validation is the reason we do any of this, but try not to get discouraged if things you post don’t get the response you hoped for!