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HowTo: Create a Compact Animated GIF of a Lights Display
( Peter Olsen)
Step 8 : Photo compression
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| | The master slide is the only one that you have to compress and tidy up thoroughly. With the other photos you only need to tidy up around the parts that you will be cutting and pasting. The most important thing is to eliminate all unnecessary background detail and then convert all very dark areas to completely black. Use the “Fill” tool to do it. If your program has a variable slider on the fill tool, increase it quite a bit so it converts more pixels to black.
Use a black pen tool or cut and fill with black on any other areas that are not black or are not relevant to the animation. eg. light reflections on the ground, nearby buildings, glows around the lights, parts of the display behind the animation etc. Leave a little bit of glow around the lights so it still looks natural.
After doing the most obvious parts, convert the image to a negative. It is then much easier to see remaining areas that are not completely black. (See photo above. Could you tell that only the bottom left corner was truly black?) Paint over the areas with white or cut and fill with white. When finished, convert the negative back again.
Save each photo as a GIF file.
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