Okay I don’t normally do text posts but I figure this is as good a reason as any. I’m not totally sure what you mean by your questions, but I’ll give you a general outline of things I do to make my gifs look decent at a large size and keep the file size below 500k as often as possible.
#1 I often work by combining multiple images. When one is already in .gif format, it has a limited color palette and hard edges. If I want to resize it for the new image, I use the “nearest neighbor” setting in the Image size dialogue of Photoshop. You also have to choose size percentages in multiples of two (200%, 400%, 800% so on) or factors of two (50%, 25%, 12.5% so on). This will preserve the hard edge and shape of the pixels in the original as much as possible. It works better with enlargement than reduction, but it stops photoshop from adding transitional colors to the image that will muck up the palette later.
#2 if I’m using a jpg or a png for something that will end up as a gif, i first save that still as a gif using save for web in photoshop, and get the palette as low as possible. if you use dispersion color and transparency dither when you save here, photoshop doesn’t have to figure it out later, which ultimately saves disk space.
#3 optimize your animation by selecting all the frames in the animation palette, right clicking on the lower left hand corner of one of the frames, and making sure that the ‘frame disposal’ is set to ‘automatic’
#4 you don’t need as many frames as you think you do. if something is moving fast, you need fewer frames to create a convincing illusion. many of my rotating 3d objects/text are only 10 frames per second
#5 if you want to make the edges of something look good when you’re cutting it out of the background, it’s ok to use quick selection for things where there’s a clear contrast between foreground and background, just make sure that you use the “refine edge” dialogue (smoothing, contrast, and smart radius are what you should play with) to get the edge as clean as possible. otherwise it’s best to use quick mask, where you can use the paintbrush tool to paint the area of a selection. just hit q and paint w/ hard edged brushes in black (selected) white (deselected). try to zoom in as far as you can so you can get your edges clean
Other than that, if I still can’t get a gif I really like under 500k w/o ruining it, I save it to my webspace and either put it in a text post in an image tag, or in the caption to an image post with a much lower res version as the initial image.
Hope that helps.
-Icky Ricky
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wow so helpful !!!
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