GIF Transparency

[-Silver-]

Hey all. I've been using Anime Studio for a couple of years now and absolutely love it. I'm currently working on a small project for my MMO guild for the upcoming Elder Scrolls Online, a guild signature with animation. The idea being to give the signature a little bit of life.

No problems animating! That's gone smoothly. But... it's when I come around to saving the image as a GIF file for display on websites that I run into issues. It uses a lot of transparency, and I end up with an ugly halo effect around the image. Does anyone have any tips and tricks for either getting around this GIF limitation, or at least lessening the impact?

I read that back in '06 someone created an animated PNG file format which allowed for animations with full transparency and colour depth. Basically, a GIF format without any of the limitations. For some reason it was never accepted, and here we are in 2013 still struggling to create animations with transparency that don't look ugly as sin...

Thanks for reading

Examples of my GIF image: The first with transparency, the second without.

[slowtiger]

This is something you need to process in Photoshop or Gimp. You need more control over the GIF settings.

Export as PNG to Photoshop. Then export as GIF from tehre. I recommend dithering with a random pattern.

[-Silver-]

Thanks, I've been using Photoshop already. Exporting from AnimeStudio as png, and then exporting from Photoshop as a GIF.

Here it is with pattern dithering... I might be doing it wrong...

[slowtiger]

You know that actual browsers display PNG transparency without problems?

[sbtamu]

If you can post the anme file I will make an animated gif out of and see if it happens on my end.

[-Silver-]

You know that actual browsers display PNG transparency without problems?

PNGs don't animate though. I'm looking for a way to create an animated image at PNG quality (with regards to transparency). Seems it isn't possible, even in 2013. Kinda depressing.