: Can I have an animated GIF with more than 256 colours per frame? Can I have an animated GIF with more than 256 colours per frame? I want to do an animated GIF but the limited colour pallet

@Welton855

It is possible to have a true colour gif and there are various articles online, however they are not very practical.

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@Yeniel560

At least in theory you can stack gifs and make the extra colors transparent.

First you copy each frame so that you have 2 of each.
Then select the area by color with the sensitivity low enough so that it selects half the picture.
Then just errase everything inside the selection.
Now invert the selection.
Then go to the next frame.
And errase everything again.
Save the end result. raw-ani.gif
Delete half the frames.
Save with a new file name. ani1.gif
Load the the previously saved version.
Delete the other half of the frames.
Save again. ani2.gif

Hack some html with absolute positioning and put ani2.gif on top of ani1.gif

Repeat the process to make 4 layers, 8, 16, what you want

You could also speed up the raw-ani.gif result and have what Kornel described.

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@RJPawlick198

Yes, you can, with certain limitations.



GIF supports per-frame (local) palettes and has "as-is" frame disposal method which allows combining of several frames.

I've written a GIF encoder "gifski" using this technique. It produces animations with about 1000-3000 colors per frame.

The catch is you can only take advantage of this when not all pixels of the image change between frames. So if you have something moving in front of a still background, you can have more than 256-color animation — the moving object will be limited to 256 colors, but the background could be composed of several frames with different palettes. With clever dithering it's even possible to reuse some pixels of moving objects.

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@Ogunnowo487

No gif files are not limited to 256 colors.

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