GIF color question
 

I make my cartoons in Photoshop. I use the Web Colors when choosing colors EXCEPT for what I call "white-guy skin tone." (I always use the same color for this) Then I save it as a GIF and select web colors.

How come that skin tone turns out looking nice sometimes:

http://www.mightywombat.com/toons/doctor.gif

and grainy other times?
http://www.mightywombat.com/toons/carne.gif

What can I do to make all my white-guy GIFs look good?

What GIF settings are you using? I've found that GIF 128 (dithered or not) gives me perfect color regardless of the palette.

try using Web-Adaptive 256. Sometimes if you're color palette is set lower you aren't hitting the colors your image needs. Also, try saving it as a .jpg and you will notice it get even better. If you're using LOTS of color, you might wanna stick with .jpg.

have you considered using png? its lossless but pretty good compression rate,
its a web standard so all browser support it. only thing it doesnt do is animations

it looks like whatever you are creating it in, is using a >256 colour palette and then dithering it, or its dithering during the same, which seems less likely given the first image and the number of colours in the 2nd image vs the 1rst.

make sure you are editing in 256 colours in the first place, pro motion http://www.cosmigo.com is an excellent palettized image editor

or as lord h said use a web based palette, usually making sure you use less than 250 colours in your palette will make it render ok., its possible the browser itself is dithering it using its own palette.

if you are using photoshop beware as it has some tricks for low colour images that it applies when you load, so you don't always see the effects after its saved.

Hmmm...when I try to save it as a GIF, using web palette, it says I have 216 colors instead of 256. WTF? Maybe this is part of the problem.

Also, I noticed that when I have a small area of color, it lookks grainy. When it is larger, it looks OK. Maybe if I monkey with the dithering, this would change things? Any thoughts?

Ah HA!

Setting dithering to NONE eliminates the problem.

Cool. Thanks!

216 colours is a webpalette , which is common for gifs.