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GIF export palette and dither issue


Gary_F

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When exporting an image with a solid white background as a GIF, the resulting file does not have a pure white background (255,255,255) and is off-white (e.g. 253,253,253) and sometimes dithered as well. This even happens when pure white is the dominant colour in the image. As a web developer it causes huge problems because the image sticks out like a sore thumb against pure white elements adjacent to it on the page. It's supposed to blend in, but it looks horrid. 

It was reported 3 years ago by someone else and has not been fixed.

Having used various software for exporting to GIF for the last 25 years, Photo does the worst job of managing the palette and dithering. It needs to realise what the dominant colours are and ensure they're prioritised and made into one of the indexed colours in the palette. I'm tired of having to export as a full colour PNG and then use a different program such as Photoshop 6 or Faststone Image Viewer to save it as a nicely processed GIF. For a one-off export it's okay but when you have dozens of GIFs to export it's a very painful joke.

Photoshop has a feature to let you manually lock individual colours in the palette if it's automatic assignment of indexed colours wasn't to your liking. 8/10 times it does a good job by itself while Photo is more like 0/10 times. 😞

Photo also has a problem exporting GIFs with a transparent 1 bit background, but I don't want that to side track from the main reason why I'm reporting this as a bug here. Please show the export tool some ❤️ which hasn't really changed since Photo was launched. Apart from fixing the GIF issue, it would be nice to have a live preview like other programs have had for, oooh, 20 years.

The example1 attachment is an exported GIF from Photo and example2 is a zoomed in screenshot to illustrate all that horrid and unnecessary dithering of the dominant background colour which effectively gives it an off-white colour. I've included the original afphoto file too.

Thank you.

example1.gif

example2.png

original.afphoto

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Hi Gary_F,
Thanks for your feedback/report. We are aware of the issue(s) with palletised exports (both GIF and PNG). They were logged quite some time ago (I've bumped the report yet again now) but there wasn't progress yet. My apologies for the inconvenience this is causing you. As much as i would like to help this is something that's on devs team hands. They have been quite busy already. I will pass your feedback nonetheless. Thanks for understanding.

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