Exercise 15: Indexing and Saving files as Gifs

Once you've made your Glorious pixel art, you'll probably want to share it with the world. Email it, upload it to a site or as a social network profile pic... A perfect file format for pixel art is a "CompuServ Gif". Gifs are files with a limited color palette, up to 256 colors. This is what's referred to as "Indexed Color". Jpegs are good for photos, but not good at all for solid colors & crisp edges like with pixel art. When saving, make sure to keep your original Photoshop file version (.PSD) in case you want to make changes later on to the original, with all layers intact, but save a .Gif version as well. To save, go to "File" > "Save As...", and then choose the CompuServ Gif format.

Photoshop will do the indexing for you as you save, and it will likely be to the exact colors used. Click "Okay" when the indexing options come up. It'll look something like this:

Usually when saving pixel art to show to other people, it's necessary to increase the size of your illustration, so people can see the pixels up close as opposed to tiny 1x1 actual size. Before saving the .Gif, go to "Image" > "Image Size" and increase to multiples of the original pixel dimensions, making sure "Nearest Neighbor" is selected for "Resample Image".

Conclusion