Animated Gifs, Optimizing Animations, Compressing Animated Gifs
Most of the animated gifs compression software works in a similar way, so it’s not so much a matter of finding the “best” program. A better approach would be to learn about how animated gifs compression works and keep that in mind throughout the image creation process.
Here are several important points about animated gifs images and how they compress:
Animated gifs are indexed color images. That means animated gifs file contains a limited color palette that is saved with the image. The less colors you use in the image, the smaller the file will be. With animated gifs, that means every frame in the file uses the same color palette… so, if you are varying the colors a lot from frame to frame, you’re going to have a much larger file. Try to limit your colors as much as possible, and use similar colors from frame to frame to obtain quality animated gifs.
Cutting down the pixel dimensions is probably the single best way to decrease the file size of animated gifs images. Cutting down the number of frames in an animated gifs is right up there with it. Animated gifs are simply not suitable for large dimensions. In general, to keep them a reasonable size for use on the Web, you should never be creating animated gifs more than a couple hundred pixels in either direction.
In relation to animated gifs, every additional pixel has to be multiplied by the number of frames in your image. Likewise, each additional frame in your image also increases the file size. Without getting too technical… think of it like this: Every time you add more colors, pixels, or frames to your animated gifs, it costs you in file size. Colors don’t costs quite as much as pixels or frames, but for every frame you add, you have to multiply it by the number of pixels in the image. And the larger the pixel dimensions, every frame add that much more to the file size for animated gifs.
There is one exception to that. Some animated gifs animation/optimization software includes a feature that compares each frame to the previous frame and discards any pixels that do not change across frames. With this feature you can significantly reduce the size of an animated gifs that includes repeating elements. Keep this in mind when you are designing your animated gifs; the more pixels that change from frame to frame, the larger your animated gifs is going to be.
Animated gifs that can increase the file size is the use of dithering. Dithering reduces banding and makes your image appear smoother when you eliminate colors in an animated gifs because it varies (or dithers) the pixels in the image to simulate color transitions with less color. So, there’s a trade-off between reducing colors and using dithering. You just have to compare the results of each and decide which the better trade-off is.
Other things to keep in mind are:
* Animated gifs with large areas of solid color compress very well.
* Textures, photos, and images with lots of color transitions don’t compress well.
* Horizontal rows of continuous color compress better than vertical color transitions.
* Images with color gradients don’t compress well as animated gifs because they need more colors to produce a smooth gradient animated gifs.
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Tags: Animated Gifs, Animation gifs, free animated gifs, Motherday Gifs
