How to make a quality gif? (w/ out photoshop)?

[Dominique]

Photoshop is rather expensive. So I was wondering if anyone can tell me how I can make a nice-looking gif, if possible. Y'know, from a video, not just photos.

[B K]

A quality GIF is an oxymoron.

GIFs are low quality because the file format itself is a low quality format. It has only 256 levels of colour. All GIFs look crappy to a degree. GIFs are a hangover from the early days of the internet, when computers had video cards that only supported 256 colours. To get a half decent gif of a photographic image, such as from a frame of video, you need to use some kind of dithering. Most image editors that support creation of GIFs have an option to enable dithering.

If you want to make GIFs without Photoshop, then get GIMP. It's free and legal and it can be used to create animated GIFs. http://www.gimp.org If you want to import frames from a video, you will also need the GIMP Animation Package (GAP) which is an additional plug-in. GAP for Windows is here: http://photocomix-resources.deviantart.com/art/GAP-2-6-for-Gimp-2-6-Windows-135464357 - for Mac you can get GAP via Macports. http://www.macports.org