Colors not exporting correctly

[the-spookiest]

The colors in gifs aren't accurate to their source files after export. The video files look fine in the UI while I'm editing the gif, but when I export, the image has lost a lot of its color contrast and saturation. I noticed it right away here, where I lost a lot of the pink and red zones:

I have tried recovering her eye color, but it's basically gray now. These are my settings:

Hoping something can be done about this because trying to get the colors back to where they're supposed to be in a separate program is getting annoying.

V 2.7.2
MacBook Pro 2023
M3 Pro chip
Sequoia 15.6.1

[lerinagalimova]

Hey @the-spookiest , Valerie is here!
Sorry for the delay, and thanks a lot for taking the time to share examples - that really helps.
This looks like a deeper issue with how colors are being converted during export. The GIF format itself has strict limits (256 colors per frame), but judging by what you’re describing (tiny output + max colors), there’s clearly more going on than just the palette limit at play.
We’ve seen similar cases before and will take another look to understand what’s happening and how we can improve it. Thanks for flagging this – it’s on our list to investigate further.

[the-spookiest]

@lerinagalimova Hello, just wondering if there's any update on this issue? I'm still noticing inaccurate colors.

[iby]

@the-spookiest hello there! There actually is, but not directly… I was looking at a regression that surfaced in Sonoma and uncovered a few other reproducible issues. So, now I know exactly what needs to be fixing that can be directly linked to this. We're currently busy with the final tweaks for v2.9 and I'll won't be able to squee this in there, but will give it a in the next 2.10 release.

P.S. I've just re-read your original post. The colors overall look fairly accurate. The issue here is most likely to be with the palette generation algorithm (we use FFmpeg under the hood for this). As @lerinagalimova mentioned, the palette is limited to 256 colors, when it's generated, the algorithm needs to figure out what colors would represent the overall picture the best. This includes dropping the colors that occur less frequently. And this is the most likely reason why the eye color is dropped, because it's a tiny portion of the image. I tried copying the eye and making it larger, and the resulting GIF now includes that purple.

So, even with the improvement I have in mind, this will probably not help with your case, because it's unrelated and we don't have any control over this. But this gives me an idea that we need to add an option to pick custom palette or custom colors that must be included in the generated one. I'll add this into the backlog, but that's gonna be a different quest.