How to Shrink GIF Files Using Adobe Photoshop™

Image files created by scanners, structured drawing programs and Photshop itself tend to contain many more colors than necessary. The use of additional colors increases the size of images and contributes to the amount of time we wait for pages to load from the Web. There are a number of programs that will reduce the number of colors automatically, but most tend to cause moderate to severe loss of image quality. It is possible to reduce the number of colors in an image manually using Photoshop, which results in little of no apparent loss of image quality. Here is how it is done.

1. First, you should to convert your image to a "web-safe" indexed color format. If you are already dealing with a GIF image, you need to convert it to RGB Color (Figure 1), followed by conversion back to an indexed color format (Figure 2). Select "Web" under the Palette option, with the "Dither" option set to "None." If this does not produce an acceptable picture, select "Diffusion" as your dither method. This will result in a larger image, but will produce more apparent colors. The resulting image will contain 216 colors, many of which are not actually used in your image. To reduce the colors to those that your image uses, select RGB Color mode, followed by Indexed Color mode using an "Exact" palette. Leave the color depth settings as they are.

Figure 1

Figure 2

2. Once the palette has been converted to a "web friendly" format, the number of colors can be reduced through the "Color Table" command (see figure 1). Selecting this command displays the current palette of colors in your image (Figure 3, below). Very often, several of the colors in your image will be very close in appearance to one another. In the example below, there are three different shades of red that are nearly identical. You can remove colors by setting their values equal to each other. Click on one of the middle shades of the red colors, which will open the "Color Picker" window (Figure 4, below). Remember the HSB settings (in this case 0, 100, 80). Then click on one of the other red colors and enter those numbers into the appropriate box and click "OK." When finished editing the colors, click "OK" in the Color Table window and watch your image. Hopefully, you will see little or no difference in your image. If you don't like the results, select "Undo" from the "Edit" menu. When you are finished editing the colors, to remove the duplicate colors, select RGB Color mode followed by Indexed Color mode, using exact colors.

Figure 3

Figure 4

An example of how colors can be reduced is shown below. The original image is a 64 color gif image. The reduced file contains only 11 colors, resulting in over a 50% reduction in image size.

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Last updated 11/17/99