How do I make animated GIFs from movies?

Where can I go to make my .gifs less grainy?

• My .gifs are showing up grainy. I use Gimp & I've heard cs4 and photoshop is better. However I don't have time for Adobe, it takes too long to configure for me. It asks me to buy a liscence when I don't want to pay. SOOO, I'm asking you guys, today in this Tumblr world, where gifs are becoming even more popular. Where or how can I go just to enhance the final cut of my blurry Gifs?

• Answer:

  Adobe Photoshop won't make a better job of making GIFs. I use Photoshop and GIMP, and I can tell you there is no difference in quality at all. The problem you are having is because of the GIF format itself, nothing to do with the program used to make it. The problem with GIFs is that they are an ancient image format, a hangover from the days when computers had displays with only 256 levels of colour. GIFs were designed for simple web graphics, and simple animations. They were not designed for photographic images at all. The only option you have of making a gif reasonably good quality in any image editor (not just GIMP) is to start off with a reasonably good image, then convert it to Indexed colour, and choose 256 colours and add dithering - which is the maximum quality you can get with a gif. In GIMP open your image, or your animation with all it's layers. Click Image > Mode > Indexed, choose Generate Optimum palette with maximum number of colours: 256 colours, hit convert. If you have problems with banding or blocky pixels/areas of colour, you can also choose the colour dithering option. In GIMP the Floyd Steinberg (reduced colour bleeding) or Positioned options usually work best. In both Photoshop and GIMPyou are stuck with adding dithering as the best option for photographic images, but it will introduce grain into the image. There is nothing you can do about that.