@Background Pony #EF22
I haven’t the faintest clue what programs people use for GIF making, sorry; I just know free ones like
ezgif
And the quality for large GIFs will be better as there’s more space to add the dithering; the optimizers play fast and loose and don’t care for averaging out colour spaces per pixel, not for thumbnail and preview images at least.
GIFs have a very small colour limit for the entire file, 256 colours per frame (for now ignore that some frames are additive so use alpha tricks to display more than that…) 256 is not a lot, even for cartoons like MLP due to backgrounds and certain objects and effects. That means that a gradient that goes from light blue to slightly less light blue can’t be shown with the full x-thousand different colours it would have in a video or other image format like BMP or PNG, but is actually just two different blue colours represented as tiny dots in one space, the amount of one over the other leading to the impression that it’s a different colour from the two that make it up.
So, very simplified, imagine ‘◼’ is one shade of blue, and ‘◻’ is another shade of blue, we want a thin, short line that smoothly transitions from left to right from ◼ to ◻; a GIF would represent that as this, using a 3x3 grid for each colour:
◼◼◼ ◼◼◼ ◼◻◼ ◻◼◻ ◻◻◻ ◻◻◻
◼◼◼ ◼◻◼ ◻◼◻ ◼◻◼ ◻◼◻ ◻◻◻
◼◼◼ ◼◼◼ ◼◻◼ ◻◼◻ ◻◻◻ ◻◻◻
Now, if you simply scale the GIF down in dimensions to a third of the size, the above turns into something like this:
◼ ◻ ◼
To the eye, the seemingly smooth gradient that showed 5 different colours now only shows 2, and the way they’re alternating looks even worse.
Overall, this is just a limitation of the GIF format; resizing a GIF is extremely lossy as the format depends on dithering far more than any other image or video format. I’m terrible at explaining things; I recommend you look into “dithering” and “aliasing effect” if any of this seems interesting.
