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Question

PSD animated GIF - weird background after exporting

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
February 15, 2022
2 replies
7282 views

hi All,

I have created a GIF in PSD and exported it according to instructions found here. At export, I have chosen to go for 'original' rather than 'optimised' noticing 'optimised' changed background colour of the GIF (which originally was white) to bluish. However, when I opened the GIF, the weird, bluey background's there. What should have I done differently?

Two screenshots below: of one of the frames as opened in psd (1st) and same camptured from exported GIF (2nd).

Windows

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Conrad_C

Community Expert

This is probably because of the extremely limited color palette of GIF, which can have only 256 colors. If it’s a still image, it would be better to export as PNG, which allows many more colors. If it’s being exported as GIF because it’s an animation, then the problem is caused by having more colors across all of the animation frames than can be provided by the 256-color GIF palette. Because the palette runs out of colors, it can’t represent the white because white is not in any of the 256 color slots, so it picks the next closest available color.

You can resolve this by customizing the GIF color palette. The animation below shows the following steps:

1. You need to tell Photoshop which color you want to change, so select the Eyedropper tool and click the color that is wrong. When you do this, one color in the palette becomes selected.

2. In the color palette, double-click the color that became selected. In the color picker that opens, specify the color it’s supposed to be. In this example, it’s supposed to be white, so I picked white. Then click OK to close the color picker.

3. Check to see if there are any other wrong colors to correct. My example still has another slightly blue background color to correct.

4. Check all of the frames again, in case shifting that color screwed up something else in another frame.

Photoshop does not do a good job of optimizing a color palette across animated GIF frames. If you do this a lot and run into this problem all the time, you may want to export from Photoshop as a movie instead, and convert that to animated GIF using a different application that optimizes the color palette more effectively, such as Gifski.

The palette in the example looks different than yours because I used the single cropped picture you attached, so it doesn’t contain all of the colors in the entire document. But it’s enough to show what can be done.

M

MargoM.Author

Known Participant

hi Conrad and Jain,
thanks for answering.
- @J E L the animation's got 64 frames (16 photoshop layers + tweens introduced in between), the res is 72ppi (724x1024 px) and the 'paper' (original images on which the layers and frames are based on) is pdf. I was actually wondering if the original file's format might be a factor here. Not sure how to check if they're text frames though?

- @Conrad_C I tried exporting psd as a video file and used spark to turn it into gif - this one worked!
Incidentally, after creating the gif I was intending to embed/ place it in InDesign or Illustrator, to add text on the side of it and then save in a format that would then enable the gif to work (ie. animate) as part of such an image/ graphic. I couldn't find a thread on this in community posts - would be grateful if you could point me to one if you know of any? 🙂

Conrad_C

Community Expert

Thnks again guys!
@Conrad_C the reason why I didn't add text while in photoshop was because I was given a brief that said 'produce an indesign file with gif embedded'. But, since the brief didn't come from a designer/ adobe user, I think they had their notions mixed up and strung me along 🙂

There's one last question I guess that I'd like to ask - is there a reason why I couldn't save the gif as 'orignial' (as opposed to 'optimised')? The colour scheme seemed preserved in the 'original' format, but photoshop would default to saving as 'optomised' (even if 'original' purposefully clicked on before saving).

Thanks and have a good weekend! 🙂

@MargoM. wrote:

@Conrad_C the reason why I didn't add text while in photoshop was because I was given a brief that said 'produce an indesign file with gif embedded'. But, since the brief didn't come from a designer/ adobe user, I think they had their notions mixed up and strung me along

That might be the case. Because on the surface…sure, you can import a GIF into InDesign. But since you can’t just publish that as an InDesign file because the only people who can read that are people who subscribe to InDesign, it has to be exported to some format that can preserve all the formatting and contain a playable animated GIF. And that is actually not straightforward. With the deprecation of interactive PDF, Publish Online or EPUB may be the remaining practical routes for media and interactivity out of InDesign.

@MargoM. wrote:

…is there a reason why I couldn't save the gif as 'orignial' (as opposed to 'optimised')? The colour scheme seemed preserved in the 'original' format, but photoshop would default to saving as 'optomised' (even if 'original' purposefully clicked on before saving).

The reason is that Original is exactly what it says: The original format, or Photoshop (PSD). That original is (probably) 8 bits per channel RGB or over 16 million colors. Literally, the way you “export original” is to save a copy as Photoshop (PSD) or TIFF. You already have that, what you are asking for is GIF. But you cannot have 16 million colors in the GIF format; it only allows 256. So if you need it to come out the other end as GIF, it can’t possibly keep all of the atttributes of the Original format.

The reason you see Original as one of the tabs inside Save for Web is just as a visual reference of the source document. Being able to see Original next to a preview of the current export settings lets you see how closely the current settings preserve Original quality. So although you can’t export Original, it’s there to help you figure out which combination of export settings end up with the least compromise. But with a format as outdated and limited as GIF, it’s almost always going to look like a compromise. The challenge is to limit the damage as much as possible.

For example, comparing a settings preview tab to Original reveals which colors are having the most trouble. Then the next step is to figure out what your options are to better reproduce those colors. Maybe you go back to the original and reduce the number of colors used in it. Maybe you lock down the most important colors as shown earlier. Maybe you turn on dithering if it was off, to simulate more colors (but trying to keep the dithering from being too obvious). It’s a puzzle to solve, but not a fun puzzle if you are on a deadline.

If the original brief is suspect, another possibility is back up further and ask what the real goal is. If the real requirement is for a crisp layout with type and millions of colors and animation, and a video format is not acceptable, maybe the solution is a different production route like laying out an animation using CSS or SVG, which play in any web browser on any mobile or desktop device. But then you’re building it in something other than Photoshop.

M

MargoM.Author

Known Participant

hello?!

is anybody out there?

I really san't find any info on how to solve this online, so really counting on someone out there in the community to shed some light please 🙏

J E L

Community Expert

Hi @MargoM. I see you don't have any answers yet, sorry about that. Can you please show us a screenshot of your export settings? Here is an example of one of my custom presets:

M

MargoM.Author

Known Participant

hi @J E L ,

Thank you for takingmy issue on and replying! 🌹

Here's the screen of my default export settings:

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