The internet might have started out as a text-based system but for most people it’s now fast and reliable enough that digital images have become an important part of the online experience. In fact for many images are what they use the web for most – photographers, designers and others display, advertise and distribute their work online. This usually works very well, because it’s cheap, simple and lets you show your images to a huge audience. There’s one big drawback though – anyone can copy your images, use them for whatever they want or even claim them as their own. Sometimes that’s okay under “fair use” laws, but usually it’s theft of intellectual property and it’s illegal. The best way to defend your rights to your work is to understand and use the copyright laws, and make good use of technology to apply them to your work.

In the USA and any other country where the Berne Convention applies copyright is automatic – you don’t need to apply for it. However if you find someone using your work without permission your copyright may need to be proved. One of the easiest ways of doing this is to simply add a digital stamp to your images when you create them, including the © symbol, your name and the date the work was created. Any image editing app can be used to do this – just make sure you “flatten” the image before distributing it, as if you leave the copyright stamp in a separate layer it may be possible for others to edit it without leaving evidence. An even more effective method is to incorporate a watermark into free versions of the image, ideally including the same copyright information. This way, if people like the image and want to obtain a non-watermarked version they can buy one from you. At the same time if anyone uses a free version it will be obvious from the watermark that they haven’t paid for it. Most watermarks are clearly visible, but others are not obvious to the naked eye; someone using the image without permission might not even know it’s there, but the creator will and can prove it.

Digital images allow meta information to be embedded in various ways. This can also be valuable in proving ownership or in complying with license conditions. For example popular web content systems like WordPress allow users to add various comments to images, including attribution of the work to the original creator.

A recent innovation is the use of Creative Commons licenses. Creative Commons is a nonprofit which has developed a series of licenses based on US copyright law. The benefit of these is they are recognized by many image sites, such as Flickr, and give the creator a lot of control over how their work is used. For example a license can be created that allows others to use the work on condition they attribute it properly to the creator, or authorizes use only for noncommercial purposes.

At first glance copyright law can seem complex, but if you’ve put time and effort into creating images you have a right to control how they’re used and to decide who profits from them. The basic steps above will let you set the conditions for use of your work, prove your copyright over it and demonstrate whether use is authorized or not. For the sake of a few minutes at the end of the creation process it makes no sense not to add all the protection you can.

GIF is the standard format used for compressing images with crisp details and large areas of solid colors like those in logos, art, or type. Being an 8 bit-depth image format it would’ve disappeared from the web after the introduction of PNG and JPEG file formats, but GIF is still one of the most favored file formats thanks to its unique frame animation feature.

Being indexed color images, GIF file contains a limited palette that is saved simultaneously with the image. The less color you use in your image, the smaller the size of the file will be. For that to happen with animated GIF’s, each frame in the file should use the same color pallete….so, if you’re varying the colors significantly from frame to frame, you’ll get a much larger file. Therefore, to limit the file size, you should try to limit colors as much as possible, and use same colors from frame to frame.

More information available here on creating an animated GIF in adobe photoshop

You can reduce the file size of GIF images by cutting down on the pixel dimensions. Cutting the number of frames in your animated GIF file will also reduce its size. GIG animations won’t work for large dimensions. Therefore, to keep the reasonable size for use on the Internet, you should limit the size of GIF animations to couple of hundred pixels.

Let’s have a close look at all available options for converting a video to GIF animation, and ways to optimize its file size. Let’s get started!

• Trimming animation-You will need to open your video file with Photoshop. For GIF animation, you won’t need the whole sequence, so you can trim the video in the Timeline Panel. At this point turn on the loop option and find a good place to trim the video.
• Reducing image size-Image size can be reduced from the Image menu. You can also do that later in “Save for Web” dialog box. It’s best if you do it in the beginning with Image Size Dialog Box as it will save considerable loading time when you open the Save for Web dialog box. You need to turn your video layer to a Smart Object if you want to resize your image, but don’t worry, this won’t affect your workflow at all.
• Save for web-The best thing about this workflow is that you don’t have to do any conversion on the Timeline panel so as to save a frame animation, because Save for Web dialog box will do this work for you once you choose the GIF file format as your output. Keep in mind that animation options will appear on the bottom right corner of the dialog box. If you want to further reduce the size of your GIF image, you can still do that here.
• Reducing the amount of frames-You can also further reduce the size of your GIF animation if reopen the exported file back into the Photoshop and delete each of its second or third frame from the Timeline Panel. Then select all the remaining frames and slightly increase their duration to compensate for any loss of frames. If this compensation is not done, then your animation will play faster than original. Once you’re ready, you can save this new version, which will be much smaller than the original one.
• Number of colors-The best option here is to optimize the size of GIF file is the number of colors used in the Color Table. The maximum number is 256, which comes with the 8-bot depth limitation. Usually, it’s best to stick with 64 colors or less, but depending on your original video you might have to increase the number of colors to get much better results.
• Choosing the best color reduction algorithm-Perceptual is best to create a custom color table by using colors for which human eye has greater sensitivity.

Adaptive is best to create a custom color table by sampling various colors from the spectrum that appear most commonly in the image. For instance, an image with the shades of blue or green produces color table made primarily of blues and greens. Most of the images concentrate colors in a specific area of the spectrum.

Selective would work best if you want to create a color table similar to Perceptual color table, but for preserving Web colors and for favoring broad areas of colors. Usually this color table produces images with the greatest color integrity.

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There are different types of digital image file that are used to encode digital images. Some of them include JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG and BMP. These file types are very important especially during compression. This is the term used when describing ways of cutting the size of the file. You may get some images that are extremely large and this implies that there will be more disk usage and slower downloads.
Furthermore, images could differ in terms of colors they contain. For instance, if an image has few colors, a file type can be designed to exploit this as a way of reducing the file size. However, you can get those simpler images with only two colors like black and white. Such images will only need one bit to represent each pixel.

Common file types

TIFF – This is a very flexible format which can either be lossless or lossy. A lossless compression will discard not even single information regarding the image. It is the most efficient way of presenting an image without compromising accuracy. On the other hand, a lossy algorithm allows some loss of information on the image in order to achieve its smaller size. In most case, this file type is used a lossless image storage format which does not use compression completely. Almost all the graphics that use this file type do not compression and as a result, their images are quite large.

PNG – PNG is a lossless storage format but contrast with common TIFF usage. In simple terms, it looks for some specific patterns in the image which it uses to compress the size of the file. Most importantly, the whole process of compression is reversible; therefore, the image can be recovered exactly.

GIF – This type of file type creates a table of up to two hundred and fifty six colors from a pool of sixteen million. For those images with fewer colors than 256, their images are rendered exactly. In case the image happens to contain many colors, the software which creates the GIF will use one of the many algorithms to approximate the colors in the image with the limited palette of 256 colors available.
It is also very crucial to note that this file type achieves compression in two ways. One of the ways is to reduce the number of colors of those images with many of them, thereby reducing the total number of bits that are needed per pixel. The second way is by replacing commonly occurring patterns with shorter abbreviations. For instance, instead of storing “black, black, black, black, black,” it just stores “5 black.” This file type is for those images with 256 colors or less. Images that contain more 256 colors are likely to lose up to 99.99% of their colors if GIF format is used.

JPG -This format is mostly used for photographs and other images with many colors. This is one of the file types which can achieve an astounding compression ratio and maintain higher quality images. Other formats such as GIF become so unkind to such images. JPG analyses the image then discards any information which the eye can’t easily notice. Unlike other files, its compression is adjustable and stores information as 24 bit color. At moderate compression level, your eye can not discern from original even at extreme magnification.

Does not include some various adobe product formats such as PSD, PSB, AI etc.

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