Optimised GIFs - How?

[Trekart]

In most GIF creating programs/plug-ins I can choose the colour depth of the image I want to create, from 1-bit through to 8-bit.

I hope I'm missing something because the XARA X GIF Export dialogue only seems to offer 1-bit (2 colours), 4bit (16 colours), or 8-bit (256 colours).

This means it is more or less useless as I still need to export my graphic to another proggy, such as Movie Gear Gif Animator, to choose a suitable colour depth for my image. I often use 5-bit or 6-bit....

How to do this in supposedly "web oriented" Xara?

Cheers

Stu.

[Trekart]

In most GIF creating programs/plug-ins I can choose the colour depth of the image I want to create, from 1-bit through to 8-bit.

I hope I'm missing something because the XARA X GIF Export dialogue only seems to offer 1-bit (2 colours), 4bit (16 colours), or 8-bit (256 colours).

This means it is more or less useless as I still need to export my graphic to another proggy, such as Movie Gear Gif Animator, to choose a suitable colour depth for my image. I often use 5-bit or 6-bit....

How to do this in supposedly "web oriented" Xara?

Cheers

Stu.

[Ross Macintosh]

Optimized gifs are not a problem in Xara. You're correct that the gif export has limited "colour depth" choices. The important thing you need to use is now the "colours used" box directly below the one for the depth. What you need to do is alter the colours used number. Lets say you start with a 4-bit colour depth. In the colours used box you can enter any number up to 16. If you enter 12, then in a few moments Xara X will refresh the preview image to display the image optimized for 12 colours. This method puts you in control. It allows you to decide what number of colours used best optimizes file size with the appearance you are willing to accept.

Furthermore, Xara X's dual preview window allows you to compare two different settings. (Click either preview pane to select that group of settings-and modify them to your heart's content). Note that you can also do a browser preview to confirm how the graphic will look in a browser before you export.

Xara X is great.

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[npopov]

Reducing colors 256 -> 30 effects only the number of colors used in the picture.
But the .gif is saved with 256 colors palette, and 226 colors are not used in the image.
Saving palette with only used colors may decrease GIF size approx. 10 to 30%.

[Trekart]

I've just experimented - these are my findings:

I drew a small rectangle over an area of a high-colour image in xara, selected no fill/no line and exported it as a non-transparent 256 colour gif. Xara reported the number of colours actually used was 248, the file size was 5811 bytes.

I then exported the same image from xara again, this time I left the colour depth set at 256 colours but edited the number of colours used to be "32".

The exported file on disk was 3533 bytes - indeed, smaller by 2278 bytes.

HOWEVER, I then took the original 256 colour image and imported it into a different application (Gif Animator), where I reduced the number of colours to 32. I saved this file to disk and its file size was 2953 bytes, 580 bytes smaller than the file saved by Xara. And they look identical (a colour count in Photoshop reveals them to be so).

So Although editing the number of colours required in Xara *does* affect the exported file size, other applications *do* produce smaller files.

Stu.