hey. i was just wondering if you can give me some advice on how you generate your gifs. I have created some in photoshop using the frame by frame animation but they all export too large to post to tumblr. (even at 60 frames and 300-500px square) any advice you have would be very helpful. Thanks for your work. I always find so much information in them. -aconsideringreallife
Thanks for the Q. The 2MB limit on tumblr can be tough. At some point you have to accept the limitations of the format and work within that, but there are some tricks to keep file sizes down.
Things that help in terms of composition – using a reduced color palette and including areas of solid color and negative space. You can also try cutting out some frames. I use 30 or 25 fps, but you can
also go with 24 or even 12 depending on the type of look you’re after.
To export – in Photoshop go to File / Save for Web. This control panel lets you adjust all the compression settings and preview the animation before saving it. In the bottom left corner it will show you the size of the GIF after compression. It’s a game of trial and error, try changing the different values to see how it affects the quality and file size of your animation.
Doing any of these will decrease the file size:
• use Diffusion dither
• turn off Transparency
• decrease Dither value
• increase Lossy value
• decrease Colors value (anywhere between 2 and 256)
