The Meadow

Fighting the gif monster

Most dollers have at some point seen the familiar teeth marks of the gifmonster. To those who are new at this, the gifmonster is what we call it when we convert our dolls into gifs, and because gif only have so many colours to show, the colours get replaced by another or flattened. In other words, eaten away. Some things can handle it, other can’t. Usually the first to suffer is the face if it’s smudged. It just looks wrong.

Gif only have 256 colours. If you just pixelate (i.e. you don’t use tolls as smudge, burn or darken) this won’t be too much of a problem. If you do use tolls however, it can be a problem, especially if you tend to make big and colourful dolls, such as I do. It’s most helpful if you have to work with more dolls in one image, or when you have an elaborate background.

I know the doll I’ve used does not prove my point very well, since naturally, once you set out to cause an accident by purpose, it won’t happen. But when you zoom in, then you can actually see the difference. It seems quite random with which the results aren’t too bad and which gets really chewed and spit out and chewed again. Now, onto the explaining of how to do it in adobe. Lets call the technique for what it is, colour reduction. It's something i discovered on my own just playing around in adobe.

Sabraelle's Garden

Image 1 above: This is the end result, when I have used colour reduction. It pretty much looks the way I made it.

Image 2 to the right : A close up of the same doll, one side that has been nibbled on, where I did not use the technique versus the good one, from image 1. On the bad version you can see that the hair has suffered a good deal, but it won’t show much in the right size, because it will just look like a very well pixelated hairpiece. You can also see that the colour of the lips have been replaced. They aren’t the same, but since I’ve used pink in the doll, the replacements aren’t very bad.

And i know it's a poor example, as the left side looks like a decent pixelated doll, but trust me, it can look much, much worse. However, i'll get back to using colour reduction for stylistic purpose later.

Colour reduction: It seems a bit of a paradox to say that to salvage the colours in your doll, you have to get rid of them, but it works. As I said before, some things can handle it better than others. When you are done with your doll, collect the clothes on one layer, the hair on another, and the base on another layer. So, you have three layers total. Now copy the clothes layer, open a new image and paste it in there.

To reduce the clothes colours, (remember that they have to be on a separate image) go to Image –then to- Mode
and you will see several option, the only ones you need to care about is
RGB with unlimited colours, and Indexed colours, the one gif uses.
Change the clothes image from RGB to Indexed. You will be prompted with the image above. I’m just showing half of it, because you don’t need to fiddle around with lower part unless you want to experiment. Nor do you need to care about Primaries or Forced. In my opinion, they don’t make much difference. But as you can see, you can also adjust colours, from the full 256, down to 1. (except in some circumstaces where it forces a minimum count, not sure why that happens).

Check on Preview (the image with the clothes responds automaticly and show how it will look at say, a 100 colours, or 50) and see on the clothes image how it look on the set colours. Go as low as you can without the gif monster making anobvious and grim appearance.

To the left: the clothes with all it’s 256 colours

To the right: The clothes reduced to 100 colours

Not much difference eh. Clothes are the best to handle colour reduction. I could probably go even further down, though the hat folds are looking a bit yellow. On the first image on top of this page, the clothes were reduced to 150.

(edit note: if you sepperate particular clothing pieces and colour reduce them sepperatly, the lower in colour you can go)

Now, copy the colour reduced clothes and paste them back onto the image with the base and such (mind keep the reduced layer above the original). Merge it and save it as a gif. This way, you save face (lol, a little pun. aww i know it sucks, but give me my little pleasures ;)

Why does this work?: It like rations. If you purposely reduce colours with the things that can take it, it will leave more colours for the things that does not, like faces. Sometimes, if you’re working on a really huge, elaborate image, you may have to reduce more than just clothes, but background and hair too. You just do what you have to do in order to keep the end results as close to what you wanted it to look like in the first place.

Large scale Colour reduction on purpose

As I’ve been playing around with this way for a while, it was inevitable that I came to the point where i figures i could use colour reduction to give my dolls a more pixel shaded look. Partly, yes, it feels like cheating, but it’s really just another way of making good use of tools in adobe. If you take individual pieces of clothing to a new page and colour reduce them down to around 10 – 20 (this varies quite a lot though, but it cost you nothing to change it) they will in fact often look more pixel shaded than tool shaded. It reduces the multitude but retains the shading.