WHAT IF I DON’T LIKE GIF?

Your animation doesn’t have to be tied to GIF. Head down the “File” menu, and you’ll find “Render Video” nestled under “Export.” This enables you to save as an MPEG4 video file, and there are a few options to lower the file size, including changing the resolution. One benefit of video is that it avoids the 256-color limit baked into GIF.

Alternatively, there are extensions to other image formats that can help, if you can find a way to export to them, because they’re not directly supported in Photoshop. APNG and MNG are formats related to PNG, and support multiple still images as frames, in the same way as GIF, but don’t have many of its limitations. Gimp can export to MNG natively, and APNG with a plugin. Then there’s Google’s WebP format, which aims to provide smaller files than PNG, and is an open standard— there’s a Photoshop plugin. The problem with these new formats is that they’re not universally supported, although recent versions of major browsers shouldn’t have a problem.

Finally, things such as HTML5 Video or the dreaded Flash can display animations, and can be coded directly into websites. These have better support, but exporting from Photoshop can be trickier.