I was working on an animated GIF image and found out some really heavy noise issues that results into heavy grains that is kind of like disturbing the motion sequence. The animated GIF image was all done on Photoshop, I manually created each of the 1200+ frames to make them, the result was just really disappointing, is there any help/solution we can do?

Here is the two GIF images I made:

The first one is just the first part I rendered from the whole part of the GIF.

enter image description here

The second one is the whole part I made.

(Link attached, sorry imgur didn't allowed me to upload 5MB+ images)


As you can see, the first one has still some noise issues BUT it is really not that obvious to see but on the second one has some really huge grains that is surrounding all over the parts of the GIF.

Is it something to do with the 256 color limit when saving for web in Ps?

Here's the default save for web settings that I always use

enter image description here

Thanks alot for the help.


GIFs have some limitations:

The graininess comes from the fact that animated GIFs have a limited color palette to work with and will use nearest-color substitution for colors that aren't in its saved palette, resulting in grainy and off-color images.

Unlike JPEGs, which can have millions of colors, or vector images (which basically match any color you need), GIFs use anywhere from 2 to 256 colors in a stored palette to render an image.

Your project has a wide range of color variations, I recommend that you to do your work in Flash or on Video. However, if you want to render your work on GIF here are some useful tips to achieve the best quality.

  • Seems that they really need to do a new version of the format type of GIF to support an unlimited color palette like JPEG etc haha. Anyway, now I have no choice but to use this grainy result of the project I am working on cause its a purely made images that is a no no to convert it on a video format or so, thanks alot for helping and giving some explanation man about this issue, I learned some of from you! – brettbrdls Sep 6 '14 at 21:29
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    And thank you for the link you gave me for the tip! Would like to hear some feedback from other experts like you hehe – brettbrdls Sep 6 '14 at 21:42
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    @bretbardolees - The problem is that you're using flat, "graphic" colours that won't stand much dithering, and the only way to reduce the need for dithering is to restrict your original (no effects) palette. – Stan Rogers Sep 6 '14 at 23:08
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    @bretbardolees yes the new format is known as PNG. Alas the animation facility of PNG never really materialized (it exists but gets no attention form browser vendors). This has seen no improvement in 10 years now, so its pretty evident it will NEVER get browser support. Use H264. – joojaa Sep 7 '14 at 8:14
  • @StanRogers you mean the effects stuff is the added shadow on the work that I've done? but those shadows are really important to me haha. – brettbrdls Sep 7 '14 at 11:00

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