>>1816937Having such a great character to work with, how could I ever stop...
>>1816837After testing a little bit more, it looks like your suggestion to try Photoshop was spot-on and just the thing I was looking for. I've previously used GIMP which offers only three presets for color reduction and that's about it. Photoshop has way more flexible options.
IIRC the hairclip highlight is not 100% white but pretty close in the source material. As for the rest of the gifs, there's 169 of them actually, and that's just by focusing on the scenes that can be looped seamlessly.