Drop Shadow Issues

[RandomTwirler]

Hey all, I'm using GIMP 2.8 on a Windows 10 OS. I've been working for several hours on a project, and everything has been fine up until now. I have been working with GIFs, adding text and borders to them, and have run into a snag. On the first GIF I was able to add text, with a drop shadow, and a border. No issue. 

The second GIF, the drop shadow does a weird 'striation/pixelation' effect when I go to duplicate my layers, in order to merge them together for the final product (to ensure every frame contains the effect). I've even gone through the process to merge the layers individually, to see if it would resolve itself...but it did not, even on the Playback. 

Is there any way that I can avoid this layering issue? I didn't seem to have this problem with the first GIF, and I have done nothing different this time around, as far as I can tell.

[rich2005]

Best Guess

The second gif has been optimised. Also the color mode can come into play.

Use

Filters -> Animation -> unoptimise
then
Image -> Mode -> RGB

then try your editing again

[Ofnuts]

(12-12-2017, 08:15 AM)RandomTwirler Wrote: Hey all, I'm using GIMP 2.8 on a Windows 10 OS. I've been working for several hours on a project, and everything has been fine up until now. I have been working with GIFs, adding text and borders to them, and have run into a snag. On the first GIF I was able to add text, with a drop shadow, and a border. No issue. 

The second GIF, the drop shadow does a weird 'striation/pixelation' effect when I go to duplicate my layers, in order to merge them together for the final product (to ensure every frame contains the effect). I've even gone through the process to merge the layers individually, to see if it would resolve itself...but it did not, even on the Playback. 

Is there any way that I can avoid this layering issue? I didn't seem to have this problem with the first GIF, and I have done nothing different this time around, as far as I can tell.

Remember that there are only 256 colors in a GIF, and no progressive transparency. So everything can look fine until you export.

Wen your image is "color-indexed" (see titlebar) which is how GIFs work, you only have 256 colors, and all required colors are shoe-horned into these 256 colors. You can temporarily lift this restriction by changing to Image>Mode>RGB but when you re-export to GIF this will hit you again.

If you are not doing animation, PNG is a better format than GIF (no color restriction).