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Exporting an animated GIF

GIF trades colour and soft edges for playing anywhere. Here is what the Colours, Dither, Frame rate and Loop settings really cost you.

File ▸ Export ▸ Animated GIF… writes a looping GIF of the Start to End range. GIF is the format that plays in any browser, chat window or forum post without a player, and the price is a palette of at most 256 colours and transparency that can only be fully on or fully off.

Browse first: the Output box is read-only and Export stays disabled until a path is set. The default name is animation.gif.

The Animated GIF… dialog, with the settings on the left and the quantised preview on the right.
A Pixel Mode switch sits in this dialog as it does in every other export window, on by default for a project that is in Pixel Mode. With it on, the crisp grid you drew is what reaches the file; every exporter used to render the smooth vector picture instead.

Colours and dithering

Colours sets the size of the palette, from 2 (1 bit) up to 256 (8 bit), and starts at 256. Celas Studio analyses your frames and builds one palette that suits the whole clip, so dropping to 64 or 32 colours often costs less than you would expect on flat, graphic artwork and cuts the file substantially.

Dither is off by default. Turning it on scatters the quantisation error across neighbouring pixels, which turns visible colour banding into a fine grain. It is worth it below about 64 colours, and it makes the file bigger: dithered noise is exactly what GIF compression cannot squeeze.

There is no quality or bitrate control, because GIF has none. Colours, Dither and Resolution are the whole toolkit for trading size against fidelity.

Frame rate

Frame rate is a fixed list (5, 10, 12, 20, 25 or 50) and opens on whichever value is closest to your project. GIF stores each frame's delay in hundredths of a second, so only rates that divide 100 exactly can play evenly. 24 fps is not on the list, and 12 or 25 is the honest choice for a project shot at 24.

Loop is Forever or Play once. Forever is the default and is what every social platform expects; Play once stops on the last frame, so make sure the last frame is one worth stopping on.

Resolution and size

Width and Height accept 2 to 4096 pixels and start from the canvas, with Lock aspect to hold the ratio. A dimmed line under the settings estimates the finished size in megabytes alongside the frame count, and updates as you change Colours, Dither and Resolution.

It is an estimate, not a measurement: a flat, low-colour animation lands well under it and a noisy one can go over. Halving the resolution is the single biggest saving available, ahead of anything the palette can do.

Transparency, and where it bites

The Background combo offers Canvas colour, Black, White and Transparent. Transparent is always available here, unlike in the image dialogs, but GIF transparency is one single fully clear palette entry and nothing in between.

A pixel is either completely transparent or completely opaque. Antialiased edges, soft brush strokes, feathered shadows and anything half-faded turn into hard, jagged cut-outs. For smooth transparency in motion, export WebP or WebM instead.

If the GIF is going onto a background you already know, the better answer is usually to pick that colour under Background and let Celas Studio composite the soft edges properly, instead of exporting transparency and hoping.

The preview

The preview runs your frames through the real quantiser at the current Colours and Dither settings, with a checkerboard behind transparent pixels. Banding, colour shifts and ragged edges are visible there before you export, so try 64 colours and look rather than guessing.

Export hands over to the Exporting… progress dialog. Cancelling deletes the partial file, so there is nothing to clean up afterwards.