About GIF format

The GIF format uses 8-bit color and efficiently compresses solid areas of color while preserving sharp detail, such as the detail in line art, logos, or illustrations with type. You also use the GIF format to create animated images. GIF is supported by most browsers.

The GIF format traditionally uses a lossless compression method, in which no data is discarded during compression. You can save a GIF file multiple times without discarding data. However, because GIF files are 8-bit color, optimizing an original 24-bit image as an 8-bit GIF will generally degrade image quality.

In addition, GoLive lets you create a lossy version of a GIF file. The lossy GIF format includes small compression artifacts (similar to those in JPEG files) but yields significantly smaller files.

You can reduce the number of colors in a GIF and choose options to control the way colors dither in the application or in a browser. GIF supports background transparency and background matting, in which you blend the edges of the image with a Web page background color.