| » Forum Index » Problems and solutions » Topic: image ready sizing |
|
Posted on 29/12/09 12:59:58 PM |
|
josephine harvatt
Gag Gadgeteer Posts: 2603 Reply  |
image ready sizing
Having just spent the holidays labouring over a fancy dan animation for the Friday challenge I see it is too big to post in Photobucket - I have got it down to 6MB by the expedient of reducing the pixel size but fear that to get it down to 1 MB it will disappear altogether. I am not very knowledgeable about the programme - basically I am saving the PSD file as a gif under "optimise as" but I do not know how to adjust the process to optimise it to 1 MB without losing too much detail. Advice in simple words as you would explain to a child please _________________ I'm not really bad - I just draw that way |
Posted on 29/12/09 1:22:54 PM |
|
maiden
Golden Gif Gagster Posts: 471 Reply  |
Re: image ready sizing
GIF optimisation is more of an art than a science but a rough guide. Firstly number of frames your animation contains - the more there are the bigger the filesize, see where you can delete frames without making the animation too jerky. Area of animation - you can usually get away with a large image size if the animation area within the image is relatively small. Size of the frame - reducing the overall size will save on the filesize. The way a gif works is to read horizonally rows of pixels and creates a log of the number of colours contained in those rows - if you have a lot of animation then there will be a lot of information for the gif to store. So try to use large areas of similar colours. Therefore reducing the number of Colors will save on filesize. Lossy - adding a bit of Lossy noise will reduce the filesize as it bands together blocks of similar colours. Dithering method - don't use Pattern and Noise Dithering always use the default Diffusion dither. Amount of Dither - try reducing the amount of Diffusion Dither which as default is set to 100%, you will see more banding of colours the more you reduce Dithering but you can often counter that with raising the Lossy which will help break up the noticable banding. Transparency - depending on your animation check and uncheck this box to see which saves you some filesize. Finally you will want to set a good Color Algorithm the best of the three methods are Perceptual, Selective and Adaptive - in most case Perceptual or Selective will give you the best saving. Hope that helps, Becky |
Posted on 29/12/09 3:18:07 PM |
|
josephine harvatt
Gag Gadgeteer Posts: 2603 Reply |
Re: image ready sizing
Would it be worth converting to grayscale ? _________________ I'm not really bad - I just draw that way |
Posted on 29/12/09 3:35:34 PM |
|
maiden
Golden Gif Gagster Posts: 471 Reply |
Re: image ready sizing
Not really the gif is limited to a maximum of 256 colours anyway, coverting to grayscale would only change the recording of colour pixels to recording of grayscale pixels - so there would be absolutely no difference. The only saving you could make using grayscale is that it's more forgiving when compressing the number of colours/grayscales as colour noise looks awful but grayscale noise just looks like film grain. However it's never a good option. |
Posted on 29/12/09 4:23:58 PM |
|
josephine harvatt
Gag Gadgeteer Posts: 2603 Reply |
Re: image ready sizing
Well I can't sacrifice any frames. and its too late to fiddle with the colours, and the rest is a bit too teknikal but thank you for your kind advice anyway as it will come in useful the next time. It may end up as a postage stamp sized gif! _________________ I'm not really bad - I just draw that way |
Posted on 29/12/09 4:29:54 PM |
|
maiden
Golden Gif Gagster Posts: 471 Reply |
Re: image ready sizing
It's not so much technical as it sounds Josephine really just a case of fiddling with the setting and seeing which optimises it best. I wish I could show you what I mean but every gif is quite individual and it's more a case of tweaking and seeing what works and what doesn't. Becky |