Save for Web - Preview faster

[lenny_bouh]

Hi,
I discovered that making animated GIF via Photoshop instead of Media Encoder makes better GIFs and let us tweaks presets.
But I have a big problem, it's that I can take me 30s to 2minutes to render the sligthess change in the presets. So it's super long to compare the best presets.

I have the feeling that Ps is actually rendering the whole GIF when I only want to render the frame to compare.
Is there a way to do it right ?

I'm curious if you have better tools to suggest me for someone whos making little animation in After Effects and need to export it in nices GIFs.

Thanks a lot

[Sameer K]

Hey, @lennycossard. Welcome to the Photoshop Community. I'll need more info to help you figure this out. Please share the system info from Photoshop Help > System info > Copy & paste into a text document > upload & attach here. 

Try using File > Export > Export As to export a GIF from Photoshop. Export As is the current method of exporting GIFs from Photoshop; Save As Web (Legacy) is a deprecated workflow.

Let me know how it goes. Thanks!
Sameer K

(Use '@mention' to tag me when you reply)

[Stephen Marsh]

The key bit here is that the last time I looked, Export As doesn't support timeline/animation.

[lenny_bouh]

Hi, thank you for your answer !
As you and Conrad said, I think that Photoshop is not the best way to tweak preset for Animated GIF for now. So I'll search for another solution.

Here's my system info anyway 😃

[Conrad_C · Accepted solution]

Animated GIF creators using Photoshop are in kind of a dilemma right now.

Save for Web is very old code, so old that certian operations such as editing an animated GIF can be very slow, and there are some size limits that people run into.

Adobe has expressed an intention to start over, so they created Export As, as a modernized potential replacement of Save for Web. That’s why they renamed it Save for Web (Legacy), because the idea is that old Save for Web is going to go away instead of being updated. But the problem with that is, like Stephen_A_Marsh said, Export As doesn’t handle animated GIF (yet?).

In the meantime, Photoshop added an updated GIF format option to File > Save a Copy. If the Photoshop document has an animation timeline, this method will preserve the animation. But (again), you only have a few options, so few that you don’t get to tweak the GIF color palette.

And as you found, Adobe Media Encoder doesn’t offer many options either.

So that’s several options, but none of them is a single complete and effective GIF optimization solution, which means…

If I have a challenging animated GIF, like one containing many colors, I will export it as a video, then run it through the free software Gifski. I get great GIF animation results that way, the file can be adjusted for smaller document size, and their advanced color optimization algorithms make it look great.

[lenny_bouh]

Hi, thanks a lot for your answer.

It's too bad that Media Encoder doesn't let us make better GIFs. I'll will try Gifski if you recommend it to me.

[lenny_bouh]

Hi again Conrad,

I looked "Gifski" but it only convert GIF images into animated GIF...
Do you have recommandation for a software that can convert video files (h264, quicktime, etc) into Animated GIF ? A software that give a lot of settings.
Thanks a lot,

[Conrad_C]

Are you sure you looked at the correct software? The picture below is what it looks like to me: I simply drag a video file and drop it into the app, and it gives me a number of choices for reducing its GIF animation file size including duration, dimensions, frame rate, and quality. Color palette optimization is automatic, which I do not mind because with no labor, the result looks better than even if I spend a long time micro-tweaking the palette settings in Save for Web (Legacy). It not only optimizes the palette and dithering, but understands how to optimize across frames. It gets the file size of that 42-second animation down to under 2MB with very little work. (Of course, I know the video screen capture example below does not have many colors, so it’s easier to compress.)

[lenny_bouh]

It seems to be the same yeah, but the windows version does not loot at all like that :

[Stephen Marsh]

https://gif.ski

Appears to be a CLI app with GUI front ends that may offer different features on different platforms.

[Conrad_C]

Oh, I didn’t realize the Windows version works differently. Are you sure it won’t accept a video file? I suppose it’s possible that the Windows version doesn’t take video files because now that I look at the source code description on their web page, it does say “You may need ffmpeg to convert video to PNG frames first.” But I would like to assume that the user-friendly GUI version would have done that for you, since they do the conversion for you in the Mac version. (ffmpeg, like gifski, is a free open source library.)

Also…what is in those File, FPS, and Quality menus at the top of your screen shot? I assume those contain options, that those menus are not just there for no reason? Like, does the File menu offer a command that accepts a video file?

[lenny_bouh]

Thanks Stephen for your help.

All of this is a little too technical for me ^^' ... When I look the github I don't understand what is ffmpeg and how to install it. Yes it's surprising !

Yes even when using the option to find files in the explorer it only shows PNG images and folders.