GIF Manipulation Tips

Besides cropping your images to make them smaller and more uniform, there are some other GIF manipulation tips you should know.

Transparent background. You can make one color in a GIF file's palette transparent so that a Web browser's background color will show through wherever that color appears in the image. It's a good idea to make the background of your animated GIF transparent so that you don't have to make your Web site's background the same color as the images.

Use Web-safe colors. Another GIF manipulation tip is to set your image's color palette to Web-safe colors. The Web-safe color palette consists of 216 colors, based on six levels of red, green, and blue. Many graphic designers who create GIFs for the Web don't consider this limitation in their images because they feel there are enough computer systems that have a color palette of over 64,000 colors. However, some computers don't have as large a color palette. If a person's color palette can't render a color properly, it coverts the color to a variation of gray, which means your once sharp-looking image is now an image that's rather unclear.

Many graphic-editing programs offer tools that let you reduce the color palette so you can get the most optimal image without losing quality. You might be surprised how good an image with only 216 colors can look vs. its 64,000-color counterpart.