Problem with animated gif

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
January 18, 2020
3 replies
9869 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!

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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

Warren Heaton

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

Hi Jane:

It's sounding like what you're experiencing is a result of a photo-realistic image being reduced to 256 colors or less - which is a limitation of GIF files. Once we get to thousands of colors (a little more than 65,000 colors), things look a lot better. Then, of course, at millions of colors (16,000,000) or more, photos look great.

If you're exporting a video file as an Animated GIF, the effect of a 256 color limit gets worse as it's the same 256 colors across every frame. If you can find an application called Debablizer, it can analyze the video and create what's called a "super pallet" that can be loaded when creating the Animated GIF; however, that software stopped being published a very, very long time ago. Debabilizer was a must-have in the mid to late 1990s when CD-ROMs were a common form of multimedia distribution.

-Warren

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