Selteco Software

Exact palette and color reduction

Symptoms

Exact palette option is grayed out and Bannershop forces color reduction

Description

GIF format is limited to 256 colors. If you use many photos or rich color graphics with gradients, the number of colors will exceed 256. In such case Bannershop must build a palette of all colors used in the image and try to find a match between each pixel of the image and a corresponding color in the palette.

Solution

If the quality of the output image is too low try to reduce color depth of each image separately. Select each photo or graphics and choose "Image" > "Colors" > "Dither/Reduce Colors"


Full color image
64 colors image
Use any value under 256. If you are unsatisfied with the result hit Ctrl-Z to undo and try different value.

Color dithering will not allow to exceed 256 colors on output but it will make images look "better" after final color reduction.

Dithering


32 colors non-dithered
32 colors dithered

If you use many frames and each frame contains a photo, you will quickly experience quality degradation. There is no solution except trying to reduce color depth of each image with "Image" > "Colors" > "Dither/Reduce Colors" command.

If you build large slide shows you can also consider using Flash Designer. Flash format has 2 advantages, it will use JPEG data so output files will be much smaller than GIF, and image quality is much better.

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