This is a gif I have been working on. When I was Photoshopping all of the frames, the lens flare looked clean and sharp. When ImageReady compiled all my frames into a gif it seems to have converted it to 256 colors. Don't gifs already support 16 bit color? Am I stuck with 256 as long as I'm working with v2.0?
GIFs are limited to 256 colors. The only way around this is to create a flash file and Adobe only started allowing flash output in ImageReady 8.0 (the CS version). Another plus is that the animation is also significantly smaller than it would be as a GIF.
On my systems with ImageReady 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 or 7.0 I have Adobe LiveMotion (either 1.0 or 2.0) for creating flash animations.
At the time of ImageReady 2.0, Adobe didn't have anything for dealing with the flash format at all (LiveMotion was released about the same time as Photoshop 6 and ImageReady 3 and was still in the beta stages after the release of Photoshop 5.5 and ImageReady 2.0). It was only after Adobe had pulled the plug on LiveMotion that ImageReady got the flash output ability.
