Like other pixel artists (or maybe not, I don't know), I am a complete amateur. In fact, most of my pixel art is done on MS Paint while I'm talking with friends on the phone or waiting for movies/games to finish downloading. I made a lot of sprites, and the only way I know that they "work well" is that fact that the way I animate is to copy-paste-undo repeatedly a new sprite pose over an old one. Yes, very ghetto.

So I was wondering, how do I make those little animated gif files that don't lose quality (last time I remember making a gif in 1998, the colors would become all messed up).

I am using a Mac, btw, but I have Windows too.

Cheers, and thanks in advance!

I use png.

For gifs, I typically string them together in photoshop or flash from a sheet. Tad expensive though.

There are free programs out there that can do the same of course, like unfreez or something like that.

I don't understand the idea of the topic but... I animate my MSPaint works copying and pasting the frames in Gif Movie Gear. I think the copy-paste step is the base of animated gifs.

You could use my Kinesis Animator, too--it doesn't force your sprites into a specific palette when showing you the preview, and it's specifically designed for sprite sheets.

It has a "Reload Sprite Sheet" button and an "Edit in MS Paint" button to make your life a little easier. :)

(It's for Windows.)


Edited by DeProgrammer - 14 February 2009 at 8:16pm

what if you are making a gif from a .AVI file. the animator itself is not the one who steals the quality from the image, is the need to compress the image to a 255 palette. not to mention, diferent compresion system lead to diferent image quality results.

but we already noticed the OP was refering to save GIFs in MSPaint