Making gifs better?

[Monblanc]

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Hallo~! Ok.. I recently noticed that when I go to make an animated gif, it looks WAY weird to me. Some people may not be able to notice, but I sure can... It gets all pixel..y..? and looks like someone smacked it with a sharpen tool a few times.. It didn't happen with some of my older stuff, but I've been noticing it more and more now, and it's ticking me off..

So, to my question: How can I make my gifs more clear like they once were, or at least to what it looks like before I save it as a gif.
I'm using Photoshop for this by the way. Any tips are appreciated. Thanks.
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[UnMistakably Mist]

Mist has a stupid amount of coursework and January exams
Its no fun >.o
And may delay some things...

There are issues with saving as gif as it does tend to reduce the image quality. This is because it only supports a certain number of colours.
Do you think your more recent work could simply contain more colours and that is having a negative effect when you save as .gif?
The only other thing i could suggest is looking to see if there are any options for gif that you can alter (i've never saved with gif in photoshop before so i don't know how it works) I know in animationshop there are a number of options for optimising an image when you're saving it. Maybe those options if they exist in some form in photoshop can be changed a bit?
Best of luck with getting it sorted in any case!

I hope everyone has a great year ahead of them

 

[Prince Noir]

Yeah I noticed when I was making a gif in flash it was annoying
I really don't know how to solve this problem sweatdrop  

[Monblanc]

Hmm... That quite possibly be it.. Too many colors... sweatdrop I didn't know it supported only so many... (well, kinda, but not really..)

What are some of the options you use? There are some in PS, but I'm not all to sure what they mean.. sweatdrop

 

[UnMistakably Mist]

Mist has a stupid amount of coursework and January exams
Its no fun >.o
And may delay some things...

Yeah the colour support is a pain.
Its why i mainly favour .png
but with people wanting animation you have to go with gif >.o
Hmmm in animationshop it gives me a host of options,
this is what it currently displays when i go to save a file-

Custom settings selected
Optimizing for Animated GIF file
Optimized output will update the current animation
Write minimal frames
Use transparency for better compression
Collapse identical frames

Optimized image will contain 255 colors (Between 3 and 255 colours are options)
No local palettes will be used
Generate palette by median cut
Map colors to palette via nearest color.
Convert pixels less than 13 (5.1%) opacity to fully transparent
Do not blend partially transparent pixels

All non-visible elements retained.

It seems like a lot >.o but really the important bits are likely the number of colours it supports and what it does to colours outside of the 255.
What i tend to do if i know i'm making a gif file is to try and not use too many colours. Its a pain especially if there is an effect you're going for but in general it works fine. (To be honest i'm not 100% sure about what half the options up there mean but i haven't really fiddled with much and it seems to do the job.)

I hope everyone has a great year ahead of them