Managing GIF Optimization

Ignite gives all the tools you need to manage the optimization of your web images. You can control GIF optimization: use of palettes and palette types, bit depth, transparency, interlacing, dithering, using hybrid colours, use of web safe colours, anti-aliasing.

You can create your own palettes, edit the existing one, add and delete palette entries, turn a palette entry into a web safe colour or a hybrid colour or lock a colour. You can even choose how the palette displays, how the colours are sorted and if you want to display colour values as hex, decimal or percentages.

Here's the duck.gif file we worked on in 'Optimizing your web images automatically'. If you remember, we opened the original in Ignite and created an output file by clicking on the New output button and choosing GIF. If we wanted to control the optimization process for this image we can do so easily using the Inspector.

This is part of the Inspector for duck.gif. Here you can set the bit depth, make the GIF transparent, turn interlacing on and off, save a copyright notice with the GIF, control what colours will be used in the palette and what type of palette you want to use including custom palettes if you want them. Ignite uses a special image optimisation algorithm which produces nice accurate palettes.

The duck image uses an adaptive palette and the second pane shows the settings for the adaptive palette. You change the web safe percentage by simply clicking on it and dragging the slider that appears. So you can set it to 100% for example. You can adjust the amount of dithering in the same way, from 0% to 100%. Turn the use of hybrid colours on and off by clicking on Extended WS radio buttons and use Area include to control the weighting of colours.

Clicking on the Show palette button will display the palette for the GIF, you can control many palette functions from here.

This is part of the palette for duck.gif. You can see that the colours are displayed with hexadecimal values but that RGB values come up when the mouse hovers over a palette entry. This is something you can customize. The lower set of colours with the black and white checkerboard icon are hybrid web colours.

Clicking the Palette button at the top of the palette window or right clicking on one of the swatches, gives you a new menu of options.

Here you can edit colours, add and delete colours, turn a colour into a web safe colour or a hybrid colour or lock a colour. You can even choose how the palette displays, how the colours are sorted and if you want to display colour values as hex, decimal (RGB) or percentages.

Using the advanced feature you can change colour weighting, select which areas of your image the palette algorithm should use when creating the final palette and manage all the changes you've made to your palette from a text log.

If you want to control the optimization of your JPEGs then take a look at Managing JPEG Optimization

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