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Abby5FC3
Participant
May 16, 2024
Question

Saving a GIF un-optimized

  • May 16, 2024
  • 2 replies
  • 1442 views

I need help with saving a gif in photoshop. I have researched, checked settings, saved different ways and nothing is working. And this is a brand new issue, never happened before today.

 

When I go in to save a gif, the same process as I have been doing for years, it saves it as optimized and is very pixelated. I switch to original and it looks great but my file won't save that way. 

 

Any help would be amazing!

    2 replies

    Conrad_C
    Community Expert
    Conrad_CCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 16, 2024

    You might be running into a common misunderstanding. The Original and Optimized tabs are not settings, they’re previews of different settings. Original is always the original (for your reference), so it is never a preview of the settings in the right panel of the Save for Web dialog box. Optimized always previews the settings the settings in the right panel of the Save for Web dialog box; in other words, the Optimized tab always shows you how the image is going to look according to the settings in the right panel.

     

    So if you think the image in the Optimized preview tab looks bad, what you need to do is adjust the settings in the right panel until you like how it looks in the Optimized preview tab. If you don’t know what to do, start with one of the GIF presets in the Preset menu, the first one at the top.

     

    Along with watching the Optimized preview tab as you make adjustments, you can watch the file size readout at the bottom of the Optimized preview tab to see if the file size and estimated download time is staying as small as you want. So, as you make GIF settings adjustments, you can use the preview and readouts in the Optimized panel both to make sure the export will meet your requirements, while at the same time comparing how it looks to the Original panel to see how much image quality is being preserved/lost at the current settings.

     

    In the picture below, I have set it to 4-up view, which lets me compare the Original to three alternate combinations of GIF settings to help me decide which one will make the image look the best. There is a blue line around preview 2, meaning it’s selected, so the settings in the panel in the right represent that preview. You can see that this makes it easy to figure out that preview 2 looks OK, and preview 4 represents a much smaller file but looks terrible.

     

    When you figure out what your best settings are, if they aren’t already a preset, you can save your own preset by clicking the little icon to the right of the Preset menu and choosing Save Settings. Then, next time, just choose your preset, and everything will be set the way you tested and liked.

     

     

    Keep in mind that it’s much more difficult to optimize for GIF than other formats, because GIF, being a more primitive format, is limited to 256 colors. JPEG, PNG, and others can contain millions of colors. So much of the challenge in exporting to GIF is not wrecking how the colors look when you only have 256 colors to work with. This is why dithering is often needed for GIF.

      A
      Abby5FC3Author
      Participant
      May 20, 2024

      I have checked all of my settings and nothing changes. When I make a gif without images, just a graphic, it looks as it should. Like I said, this was sudden and nothing in my process has changed. I have even tried old photos that hasn't had an issue and it still does the exact same thing. Below is a screenshot if what it looks like.

       

      I have tried other machines, updated my adobe, restrated my computer and nothing has changed. 

       

       

       

      Conrad_C
      Community Expert
      Conrad_CCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      May 20, 2024
      quote

      I have checked all of my settings and nothing changes. When I make a gif without images, just a graphic, it looks as it should. Like I said, this was sudden and nothing in my process has changed. I have even tried old photos that hasn't had an issue and it still does the exact same thing.

      By @Abby5FC3

       

      A simple graphic without photos is much easier to reproduce in GIF because it will have relatively few colors, such as a logo with one or two colors or a comic strip panel or Illustrator vector graphics with maybe 10 colors. In those cases, the 256 color palette of GIF is enough. But a photo often has more than 256 colors in it, when you count all of the shades used for gradations and shadows.

       

      In the screen shots that you posted, what do you think about the quality of the #4 (bottom right) settings? The clouds seem to look most photographic using those GIF settings, because they use 100% Dither to simulate more colors when only 256 colors are possible. High dithering is a common tactic to try to get a better reproduction of a photo when GIF is required. This is why JPEG is preferred for displaying photos in a web browser, because JPEG supports millions of colors without dithering.

      didiermazier
      Community Expert
      didiermazierCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      May 16, 2024

      Did you try File > Export > Save for Web (inherited)?

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