Making a gif file smaller

[mouseyicons]

Is it possible to make this file LJ size (It's about 53kb and it needs to be 40 kb) in GIMP without removing any frames? I really doubt it's possible but I thought I'd just ask you lot.

Comments

[nomadicwriter]

Does setting the colors back allow it to look better with the setting at none?

Kind of the opposite, actually: less colours makes having any sort of dithering look worse. Basically, when you've got a smooth gradient on the original picture, colour-reduction can't handle it very well. Either you get flat areas of colour called 'banding', which is the oil painting-type effect you mentioned, or you can try to break up the visible edges between colours a bit by using 'dithering': patterns of dots that mix a little bit of one colour into the next.

To some degree, I guess it's really just personal preference, but generally, the smaller the image and the less colours it has, the worse dithering is going to look. If you're making, say, a 400x250 GIF or something, then banding is going to be really obvious and ugly because the scale is big and the flat areas of colour will be quite big, whereas dithering is not so obvious to the eye. But at tiny 100x100 icon scale, banding doesn't look so bad because the bands of colour are themselves quite small, while dithering patterns stand out more and destroy more detail because the scale is tiny enough that altering individual pixels makes more difference.

And if you reduce the number of colours, that makes dithering stand out more too. (Because if, say, you've got 16 shades of blue, then you can add dots of "very dark blue" to "medium dark blue" and have it blend quite well, whereas if you've only got 4 shades of blue to dither with, then you end up adding dots of "very dark blue" to "bright blue" and it shows up a lot more and doesn't really blend at all.)

Really, though, it all depends a lot on what your original image is like. It's not just the number of colours, but how much they're smoothed, how similar the shades are, how fine the details are, and various things like that. A cartoon-based animation like this one is likely to look better non-dithered than a live-action one would, because the colours are more solid and less varied than in a photograph anyway. In most cases it's probably worth testing both ways to see which one looks better, though that can be a pain in the butt if the program you're using doesn't have a preview function.

[captivatedlady]

cool, thanks! I usually use the setting that makes it look like little dots but it looks better than the melty thing. I will try changing it up next time I make one and see how it goes. Thanks so much for the help.