Sogna Digital Museum Forum
Sogna/VIPER Series => Sogna VIPER Discussion => Topic started by: BremenDruid on January 03, 2011, 08:58:00 pm
-
Hey guys, new to the forum here. I made some custom CTR Gifs with Miki, wanted to know what everyone thought and also wondered if I could get some help with another one I'm trying to modify:
-
Ehhh... hmm...
Odd color choices, and lots of dithering. You've got some ways to go to make it look seamless.
-
Yeah these are actually my first attempts at customizing the gifs. Probably could use a better program too, I'm actually just using Microsoft Paint for the most part.
-
anything else > mspaint.exe
-
What would you suggest for a good program to edit and create new gifs?
-
I use a very old version of Paint Shop Pro (5 to be exact) and its companion program Animation Shop. It's getting a little clunky to use in Windows 7 (some windows don't get sized right) but I like it becuase it has all the features I desire without all the extra crap. Most modern imaging programs seem to be overboard in optimization for modifying photos and practically disregard normal from-scratch graphics creation (though PSP does have a nice set of photo-editing tools and operations and supports several dozen formats)
Animation Shop has a lot of nice features for creating animated GIFs, such as palette optimization with transparency, supports local palettes for each frame, and removes non-visible elements for smaller file sizes. Plus you can set the delay on each frame. Alot of lesser animation GIF programs will use a single palette for the whole image, not support transparency, do a crappy job reducing the colors or terribly dither the image, keep alot of non-visible artifacts which bloat file size, and set the frame delay to 0ms so it doesn't play consistently.
The only thing I wish Animation Shop would do for me automatically is be able to specify a color to be treated as transparent for all frames, which would let me set blue as transparent for VIPER images. Instead one has to use PSP and do this for each frame manually (or whip up some program to do it automatically :smalltran)
-
I use Gif Movie Gear for animation purposes. Does all the positive stuff JG00 says his Animation Shop does PLUS lets you pick a transparency color for the whole animation with one click. I'm guessing a newer version of Animation Shop would probably have that feature. It's not the sort of feature I would think really advanced and hard to implement.
Another thing GMG does that I like is a "blend animation", which puts one file on top of another and automatically works out the frame timings. In most cases, it's useful for putting the moving part of the animation on top of the background, but it's also handy for combining different animations entirely, like so (http://hyperguy.net/carrerachan/viper/src/127265415457.gif), without having to piece together the frames one-by-one.
For actual graphic editing, I have Photoshop Elements. Does pretty much everything you would need Photoshop to do, plus many things you don't. I think more people understandably prefer Paint Shop Pro which is a little more slimmed down and more easy to acquire. I got my Photoshop as a gift though and I'm not complaining.
Gif Movie Gear also has a feature that can open up the graphic editor of your choice to edit a frame on the spot. I have it link to Photoshop, of course. It can be tricky though, if you're not careful to stay within the original palette of the frame, then when you save the gif, you may be surprised to find that frame to have suddenly changed to a psychadelic mess of all the wrong colors.
Photoshop Elements can also create animations itself, though through a much clunkier method nowhere near as good as GMG. It has no problem expanding the palette though, naturally reducing to 256 colors if you go over, but not losing much overall image quality. So sometimes I'll switch between working on the same animation in PSE and GMG so the programs can compensate for each others' weaknesses in editing animations.
-
I've had no problem animating gifs using Photoshop all these years. One of its best features is that it allows you to change a specific color, then does so for all the frames (unfortunately you can't set a color to a transparency without going through each frame individually).