Problem with animated gif

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
January 18, 2020
3 replies
9876 views

Hi everyone!

I have been using Photoshop 2020 this past week to create animated gifs for a color theory class I'm taking. While I'm more familiar with the Adobe Indesign and Illustrator applications, creating these gifs were fun and Photoshop was super easy to navigate/familiarize myself with. When I got to the part where I need to save for web legacy, that's when I ran into some issues.

When I click File > Export > Save for web (legacy) a window pops up with all of the presets (default set at [unnamed]). Per the project requirements, I am supposed to save these gifs as animated gifs. When I click on the preset tab arrow, my instructor says there's supposed to be an option for it. There's not. My options are:

GIF128 Dithered

GIF 120 No Dither

GIF 32 Dithered

GIF 32 No Dither

GIF 64 Dithered

GIF 64 No Dither

GIF Restrictive

And so on. I looked online and it said to select GIF 128 Dithered and then change the color to 256. When I do that, it changes the GIF preset back to [unnamed]. So now I'm at a loss. I've tried uninstalling/reinstalling Photoshop, and still nothing. It's becoming very frustrating. I can't seem to get it figuredout.

Thank you all in advance!

This topic has been closed for replies.

janel7202951

Participating Frequently

Hello!

I am having the exact same problem. When I change the Preset to 'GIF 128 Dithered' it won't then let me change the Colour setting to '256' it just changes the option back to 'unnamed' and as a result the GIF looks terrible quality. Is there something I can do?

Ive made lots of GIFs last week and didn't have this problem.

Thanks so much

Warren Heaton

Community Expert

Yes, the GIF 128 Dithered preset will set the Colors value to 128; however, all you have to do is increase the Colors value (it's not locked). The Preset pop-up will change to "Unnamed", but just leave that alone or use the pop-up menu to the right to "Save Settings..." You could name it GIF 256 Dithered if all you've done is start with GIF 128 Dithered.

-Warren

Conrad_C

Community Expert

Hi Warren,

Thank you so much for getting back to me. I have just tried this, and it has worked. Thank you so much.

Just one thing, I was shooting on a plain pink background and the colours in the background are very pixelated / distorted in the shadows and look a bit crap. There are 118 files in the GIF so the error message kept coming up until I reduced the image size to 1500. Might you kindly have any advice on how I can improve the quality (I already changed the setting from 'Optimised' to 'Original' on the top left)

or is it simply because the GIF exporter can't handle so many files?

Thanks a million.

Jane

A couple of things:

First, the reason the Preset changed to [Unnamed] is not a concern. GIF 128 Dithered was simply a named preset, or saved combination of settings. When any setting is changed, the new combination no longer matches what was in the preset, so it changes to [Unnamed]. It does not check to see if the new combination of settings matches any other existing preset, so even if the new setttings matched a preset called GIF 256 Dithered it would not automatically match it up. What matters is that the settings are what you want. And if you wanted to use those same settings again in the future, you would do what Warren said and save your own preset and name it GIF 256 Dithered.

Second, without seeing it, one reason the background and shadows look bad is probably not directly due to the image size or number, but might be that the GIF standard only allows up to 256 colors. If the color palette of your 118 images changes enough over time, the 256-color GIF palette may not have enough colors to cover them all. The color palette in Save for Web lets you do some advanced things like locking important colors, which is one way I deal with that. Or see if there is any way that color variations over time can be reduced so that all colors used across the 118 files could be represented by only 256 colors.

Or, you can increase the percent of dithering, or try a different dithering method. That can simulate more colors, but at the potential cost of larger file size and more visible dither dots.

If everything gets too difficult to resolve within the archaic 1990s limit of 256 colors that animated GIF allows, it’s time to start considering whether it could be done as a standard H.264 video instead, looping in the background of a DIV element on the web page.

Ussnorway7605025

Legend

your instructor is wrong, there is no standard for animated Gif

more than 1 frame
number of repeats... this has changed from forever (early internet days) to a limited number (to combat adds) and back to forever which most todays browsers allow