Postby madphilb » Wed Jun 02, 2004 8:24 pm
Here's a quick lesson in image file formats.
JPG only supports still images (in fact the only widely supported animated image format for the web, esp. for avatars, is GIF).
JPG, BMP, PNG, etc. they all support alike 16million colors (or there abouts), where as GIF only supports 256, however it can be 256 out of the same 16million that JPG supports.
Most likely you've got your image either with an Alpha channel (partial transparency) on the layers, GIF only supports 1 color of the 256 for full transparency.
IF it's the Alpha issue you'll need to look at a different way of doing things, or maybe you'll just need to threshold your Alpha channel (while the GIMP will do this quite easily, most people give me blank stares when I mention this... someone wise in the ways of your software will have to post how). Basically it just means that you'll have to decide how transparent is fully transparent and the rest is not.
If it's the color issue then you need to convert your image over to an Indexed format and most likely without any dithering. Depending on how much color is in your animation you may not get the best results by letting the computer pick the colors.... and be warned that not every computer sees the colors the same way, though I'm sure that's improved in the last few years (there are Web based color pallettes that are supposed to support as many different systems as possible.
Anyway, hope that helped rather than got you confused.
PHIL
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