Animated gif and gradient color problem

Question

Hi there,
I have been trying to create animated gif with gradient background. My animation works alright but the problem is that when I preview either in browser or in the preview mode, the gradient doesnt look smooth. I want to know if there is a way to work around this? I have seen some on other websites and it looks perfect. I'm wondering how they do it.
I'll appreciate anybody's help.

Answer 1

Cobby Fred wrote:
I have to thank you all for your assistance so far. I must say I only know how to put some few things together and I do not understand some of the technical words you used such as dither, geometric dithering, blending mode... But in all I understand that if I blend colors that are close I'll get something close to smooth.
Here's Wikipedia's page on dither: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither Scroll down till you see the images of the cats on the right-hand side. It's a little over half-way. In the original, the cat's pretty much a gradient. If that image is saved as a .gif, see how you get wide areas of color? It almost looks like a paint-by-number picture. This similar to what happens to your radial gradient when you save as .gif. I used the word "geometric," because the radial gradient will produce arcs of grey colors. The third image of the cat has dithering. This means that, instead of setting the colors in the original image to the closest one in the restricted palette, the software tries to figure out how to speckle the image to produce an average that would look better at a distance. Turning on dithering when you go to output your gradient will help make your image smoother, just as the third cat image is smoother than the second. Here's where you turn on dithering if you go through File > Image Preview:
Here I have my unflattened .png file
No, it's flattened. It's a single bitmap.
Here's a noisy image I created. It has a radial gradient at the bottom then a texture layer that has it's visibility off, because I copied it to make a greyscale version to use. I've set that to have 25% opacity and a blending mode of Multiply. Both the opacity and blending mode controls are at the top of the layers panel. This is a FW .png (Edit, no, it isn't! The forum  has stopped supporting that! ):
If I export the gradient alone, without the texture layer, I can get this (settings are "64-color" greyscale palette and no dithering):
or this (turning on dithering):
While the dithered image is better, it still shows the arcs. If I set the texture layer back visible, and export with dithering on, I get this:
The noise in the texture breaks up the geometric arcs, which makes the image look smoother. Any small texture will do that. Choosing the 64-color greyscale palette gives me either 22 or 26 colors.The 32-color palette gave me 12. You should experiment with the .gif palette settings to see what you like best. Remember that the more colors you assign to your background the fewer colors you have available for your foreground objects.
As a final point, the red text looks blurry. When I zoom in on it (400%), some of the lines are partially "broken," specifically the verticals on the L, T, and N. You might want to try a different font or adjusting the size so that the aliasing (mapping) to the pixels is cleaner. Italic text in small sizes is difficult to use.