animated avatar size

[Shaun]

I thought I might try an animated avatar and played around with my cat picture in ImageReady.
But the smallest (optimised) I can make it is 62K and the limit for avatars here is 10K.
Is it possible to "squash" it in some way? or is it as low as it can be?
Here:

 

[Welles]

Shaun,

Well I dropped the size of the GIF to 13,657 bytes and almost kept the look similar. I did it by opening the GIF in ImageReady and immediately started figuring out how many of the original 32 frames I could eliminate. I've got it down to twelve. I increased the delay to .1 second for all the frames to enhance illusion of similarity to your original GIF. A big reduction came from using 100% web snap and 32 colors. I've included an Optimize palette which includes the settings. The only way to reduce the GIF further would be to drop some more frames, I'm afraid. I did wonder about crafting your Photoshop file with one Layers as a base image of your cat and then a bunch of additional layers with transparent color 'overlays' clipped by a mask of the original layer. If you opened a file like that in ImageReady you could use the 'base' layer in each frame and make the series of overlay colors visible as well in different frames. Would the optimized GIF size be reduced? I'm not sure but might try that some time.

 

[theKeeper]

Ok, try this then...

Use only one layer for your main cat photo.
Then on each new frame, as many as you need to create the number of colour changes you want, ad a HUE&SAT Adjustment Layer above the photo layer.
When you add a new frame, change the HUE setting in the adjustment layer to the new colour you want.

Given the fact that Adjustment layers do not add anything to the file size of your document, it may help in creating the animation at a much smaller file size also.

Can't hurt to try it!

PS: the only thing you'll need to take note of here is that by fading from one colour to the next, you're essentially adding a large number of intermitant frames to the animation. Try to keep this effect to a minimum if you want the smallest file size. :B

 

[John1]

Adobe's product line is as inconsistent as... mmm...

Try this for example; add a new layer in PS, let's say a blue background, add a grouped H&S layer, change its settings and now transfer this to Imageready. Click on the H&S layer in Imageready.... surprise! 8}


The idea about separate H&S layers is a good one, but it doesn't work when you start thinking about about it; the result for each frame will still be a separate image.

 

[Shaun]

Thanks for the ideas. I shall experiment some more!