I don’t have a lot of experience making animations, but I foolishly spent the last 3 days making an animation in RGB color mode… well , going to export it , it obviously changes the colors a lot when converting to .gif. It is really large , 480 frames , 30 layers… I tried flattening the image and switching to Indexed, but it still looks really bad. Usually I use Photoshop to switch back and forth between RGB and Indexed for my aseprite still images… I am not sure why but it does a better job switching color modes, but I am realizing there is no way for me to send an animation over to Pshop to switch color modes because it can’t read .ase and I can’t export it as a gif or it will have already converted the colors to indexed.
am I screwed or is there a workaround to export this animation without wrecking the colors? Could I export as 480 pngs and create an animation that way ? thanks in advance
.gifs only support 256 colors which is the only thing that would ruin the colors when you export. It happens if you use a lot of transparencies, but otherwise you’re usually fine.
The other alternative is that your color profile is making things look different after you export. Try going into Preferences -> Color, and either enabling Color Management and picking an sRBG working space, or disable the color management entirely and see if it changes. It might be that the color managment is just making the colors look wrong in the program, instead of the export ruining the colors.
it does use a ton of transparencies that is why it looks bad when converting to gif… aseprite gets confused or something and doesn’t pick colors that are close in hue (?) , or I’m not sure what properties it uses to pick because it changes things massively… so I usually bounce back and forth between aseprite and pshop, and pshop matches very well. No big deal, easy/minor workaround.
I just kind of solved my issue by manually picking the most important 256 colors into my palette before converting to .gif. Aseprite was able to use this palette to make a much more accurate .gif rendering.
i think that may be the issue, aseprite doesn’t prioritize the colors by importance/usage before making the 256 color palette ? so it may not include major colors that you used widely over your canvas and instead pick other colors that may only occupy a few pixels… I could be wrong about this but that is my guess
Does it need to be a gif? Not a lot of places on the internet are left where mp4 or webm isn’t accepted. So you could export a PNG sequence instead, and use a program (I don’t know one off hand) to compile them into an mp4.
Aseprite does prioritize colors based on usage I think, however if you’re making big complex animations it’s best to export them as a series of .pngs and loading that into whatever video editing program you intend to use. If you want things to be .gif you kinda have to avoid transparency layers as much as you can.
@vegeta897 it doesn’t explicitly need to be a .gif, I thought that was the standard for animations on the web, but like you suggested I am learning that .mp4’s are better
oh ok for whatever reason the accuracy has not been there for me when converting between color modes unless I manually create a 256 color palette using the eye dropper tool , then it performs much better.
Yeah lesson learned on the transparencies / .gifs , I have spent the entire day going back and cleaning my frames up changing transparencies back to opaque … what a mess. Wont make that mistake again.
A workaround I used though , was playing the .ase file and using OBS screen recorder to record a 2k video screen capture saved in lossless quality video which could then be converted to .mp4 or such for uploading to the web.
I’m sure there are better ways but I haven’t figured it out yet. In the future I’ll just stick to 256 colors and no transparencies if i’m making a .gif