Improving GIF Image Quality

Why does the image quality get worse when I save the animation?

The gif format used to create the animation is limited to 256 colors. So, when the image gets converted, the image washes out because you are going from thousands of colors that may be in an image or logo to 256.

Best Way to Improve Quality

When using animation, save the individual non-animated gif on the save tab and use the gif cruncher to reduce the number of colors as much as possible. This is the easiest method to improve quality. The gif compress box appears after you press the save button and enter the saved name. Change the Number of colors compressed and click the Apply Preview button to see what the compressed image looks like.

  

The two images above are uncompressed gifs that contain approximately 234 colors. When they are combined in the frame by frame animation, the resulting animation looks like this:

You can clearly see how colors are swapped when they are added together. The image quality is very poor.

Here are the images where the colors are reduced to 128 colors in each image.

  

Now, here is the frame by frame animation that combines the images.

The colors are much improved and the resulting animation is 10kb smaller than the non-compressed image and will load faster on a webpage.

Other Ways to Improve Quality

1.    Limit the number of frames in the animation. You can try to limit the number of frames by increasing the step value on the one step animation.

2.    Use a plain background. Gradients and background images can add lots of colors.

3.    Try using non anti-aliased text (check box on the Text+ tab) or text on the Angles tab. Anti-aliased text has shading between the background and letters and this can increase the number of colors.

Another Option to Improve Quality

If none of these tips improve your animation, you may want to consider Banner Maker Pro for Flash. Banner Maker Pro for Flash uses the flash format (.swf) instead of the .gif format for animations. The files do not have the 256 color limit and the animation is better.