Color overlay disappears on motion panel

Layer Styles are frame-specific, did you set the Color Overlay with the specific frames selected in the Timeline Panel? 

(edited)

We may have to see the file, but one likely theory is that…you’re trying to make an animated GIF. 🙂

That is based on the fact that:

If it’s an 8 bits/channel Photoshop document, or exported as an MP4 video, the file can use millions of colors.

If it’s the creaky old animated GIF format, just 256 colors are available. And I think if you use transparency, only 255 colors are left.

A major problem with the 256 color palette of GIF is that the more colors there are in the original document, the less likely it is that all of the colors can be successfully reproduced in GIF. It is very easy to run out of those 256 colors, which happens a lot faster if the original content changes frequently during the animation or has a lot of continuous tone or gradients. When the 256-color limit is hit, something’s gotta go, and sometimes it means some colors are thrown overboard, which you see as wrong colors or lost colors.

Animated GIF works best with flat color animations using a limited color palette, such as cartoons; it is very badly optimized for video-type animations.

Also make sure that you have tried both ways of exporting an animated GIF from Photoshop, because it isn’t clear which one you tried or if you tried both:

File > Save a Copy, select GIF from the Format menu and adjust options.

and

File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy), set format to GIF and adjust options.

The first thing to try is to make sure dithering is enabled, so that more colors can be simulated by grouping pixels of the limited available colors. If you are using Save for Web (Legacy), you may have to test what combination of dithering options works best; another way is manually optimizing the limited color palette to match the content, which can be a lot of work.

If nothing in Photoshop works out, try something else. Render it from Photoshop as MP4 and bring it into other software that uses other ways to reproduce color well within the limitations of the GIF color palette. The desktop Creative Cloud apps don’t really have a animated GIF converter that offers both effective color optimization and control over limiting file size, however, you can test to see if the free GIF converter provided by Adobe Express will get you the results you want. A good animated GIF converter with both effective color optimization and file size control is Gifski (free), which is available from the Mac App Store.

Could you please post screenshots taken at View > 100% with the pertinent Panels (Toolbar, Layers, Timeline, Options Bar, …) visible?