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Anti-Whitewashing Tutorial ft OFMD

For anonymous, my beloved

When making edits of characters of color, its imperative that the original skin tones be left as they are. In characters with brown skin tones, it can be all too easy to unintentionally lighten the skin and whitewash them or over saturate the skin and make it look orange or red.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to keep the original skin tone. This is not a tutorial on how to make a gif, but I will link mine at the bottom. This tutorial primarily focuses on Taika Waititi and his skin, but I do have a tutorial that focuses on black skin with the BBC Merlin fandom that will also be linked at the bottom. However, the process is pretty much the same.

This tutorial will work for Photoshop andPhotopea.

Step 1: Make your gif. Crop it, sharpen it, etc.
This is my gif, which has only been sharpened.

Step 2: Basic recolor
Here I’ve added Curves, Selective Color, Hue/Sat, and Vibrance. When setting your Curves layer, keep an eye on the character of color. Make sure you’re not overlightening the gif and washing the character out completely. It can be helpful to do your Curves layer last or edit it after you finish.
In this one compared to the first, you can see how red and oversaturated he is and that’s not at all what we want. He can look better.

Step 3: Reduce redness
To reduce the redness of his skin, we’re going to add another Hue/Saturation Layer. Set the Range to Red. Set the Saturation Bar to -30 and the Lightness to -5.
This isn’t the hard and true way of reducing redness. There are other methods, but this is the one that I think looks best. Alternatively, you can play around with the amounts and duplicate as needed.

Step 4: Bring back warmth
He no longer looks abrasively red, but he does look washed out and crusty. To fix this, we’re going to add a Vibrance Layer at 30. I oftentimes duplicate this layer once to make the colors richer, but use your best judgement.

This is what your gif should look like. Taika looks normal again, he doesn’t look washed out or red. From here you could add in whatever extra stuff you’d like to or post it as is.

Here’s another side by side of the original (left) and the edited version (right).