Producing high quality gifs

[Kevin17265391y1sa]

I am supplying images for a website. Landscape, 2000 px minimum

I am trying to create GIFs from an image series

Sources are decent:

No matter what I try, GIFs are not acceptable:

 

 Any input would be appreciated on how to get these GIFs more true to the originals

thanks

 

[Conrad_C · Accepted solution]

GIF is one of the worst formats to do this with. A major limitation is that GIF can only have 255 colors. This severely limits how well you can reproduce color quality. When trying to reproduce color gradients like you have in the bones, the 255-color palette runs out very quickly. So then GIF exporters have to try dithering the available colors, which doesn’t look smooth.

Also, a 2000-pixel GIF can be a large file because GIF does not compress well with images that have many colors or are photographic. GIF was really meant for solid color graphics.

At 2000 pixels, you are likely to get much higher color fidelity and lower file sizes with a true video format such as H.264. If there is any way to use a real video format on the website instead of an animated GIF, it will make the job a lot easier and the results will look infinitely better.

If you must do this as an animated GIF and want to control the image quality, then you will want to research the craft of manually optimizing a GIF color palette across multiple frames. That is not specific to Photoshop, but in Photoshop you can apply those skills (to a limited extent) in the color palette editor in File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy). An alternative is to export a video and convert that to animated GIF using other software, such as Gifski (free), which can convert video into animated GIFs that look and compress better than in any Adobe application that I know of.

[Kevin17265391y1sa]

Thanks Conrad - that was really helpful.

It is still nice to get an actual human response and not an AI mish-mash!

I have been begging for the use of video...I will try the video to Gifski approach.

[rayek.elfin]

Nowadays all browsers support both animated png (apng) and animated webp. Those would be your best options to publish your animations to the web aside from video formats. Apng and animated webp support full colour, full transparency and webp also offers a choice of either lossless or lossy encoding (lossy encoding compresses well for video).

Obviously Photoshop and other Adobe applications still lack support for these commonly used web animation file formats (Adobe lags behind the curve as per usual), but the free and easy to use Screen2Gif will not only export animations/videos to animated gif, but also animated png and webp files! And also affords various methods to optimize the animations.

https://www.screentogif.com/

...and stop using animated gif. As Conrad C pointed out: It's outdated and limited. Animated WebP is probably your best bet: set to lossy encoding and the files will be quite acceptable file size wise.