Animated Icon Questions
Hi! I've been using GIMP for 3 months now, and I've really been enjoying the questions and answers posted here so far. I've learned some wonderful things. I have a few questions about making animated .gifs, and I looked through the animated gif tag, as well -- those helped me get to this point! Thanks. :)
I made this icon yesterday, for someone's request:
I used GIMP 2.6, with the GAP plug-in to extract the original frames.
Here's basically what I did:
**I selected every third frame and cut a big section out of the middle to get just Juliet's kiss and Shawn's eye close. This took it to 14 frames.
**Then I resized to 80x80, and changed the canvas back to 100x100 to add a white background
**I went through every individual frame and lightened it using curves (SO time-consuming)
**I duplicated the first and last frames two times and merged white layers at 33% and 66% opacity to get the fade in and fade out. Now the icon had 18 frames.
**I optimized for GIF and set the frame rate to the speed I wanted
**I set the colors to indexed. I kept playing with the number of colors until I reached 40, which finally made it small enough for LJ (It's 38K now)
But it's way too pixelated for my taste. I know I've seen icons of this length which seem to have no loss in color. I'm assuming they were made in Photoshop, or something else... but is this possible in GIMP?
Here are my specific questions:
1) Is there a way to use curves, saturation, frames overlay, etc. on all layers at once? Doing it frame by frame is REALLY time-consuming (and hurts my wrist, lol)
2) How do I limit the colors without getting this sort of pixelation? Am I doing something out of order?
If you have the answer to even one of these, you'll be oodles of help.
I made this icon yesterday, for someone's request:
I used GIMP 2.6, with the GAP plug-in to extract the original frames.
Here's basically what I did:
**I selected every third frame and cut a big section out of the middle to get just Juliet's kiss and Shawn's eye close. This took it to 14 frames.
**Then I resized to 80x80, and changed the canvas back to 100x100 to add a white background
**I went through every individual frame and lightened it using curves (SO time-consuming)
**I duplicated the first and last frames two times and merged white layers at 33% and 66% opacity to get the fade in and fade out. Now the icon had 18 frames.
**I optimized for GIF and set the frame rate to the speed I wanted
**I set the colors to indexed. I kept playing with the number of colors until I reached 40, which finally made it small enough for LJ (It's 38K now)
But it's way too pixelated for my taste. I know I've seen icons of this length which seem to have no loss in color. I'm assuming they were made in Photoshop, or something else... but is this possible in GIMP?
Here are my specific questions:
1) Is there a way to use curves, saturation, frames overlay, etc. on all layers at once? Doing it frame by frame is REALLY time-consuming (and hurts my wrist, lol)
2) How do I limit the colors without getting this sort of pixelation? Am I doing something out of order?
If you have the answer to even one of these, you'll be oodles of help.