I have made a grave error. I spent about three hours making my entry to the leaf contest. I edited all well in photoshop making the perfect frames for my gif.

then i put it into image ready only to realise that i have created a 1600x600 file which will not scale within the restrictions. Regretfully i have to ruin my work by making it out of shape but it still looks o...k....

THen i go to save it but with rediculous file size. 7 frames 550 by 350 (i think) and i cant get ti under 550 with out making it look really bad quality what are you useing to make your gifs imageready? how are you optimising them?

I reduce dithering amount and use the advanced setting on the lossy sliders (and of course reduce colour depth)

I ended up with about 70 colours, 85% dither and the 2 sliders in the advanced lossy applet were at minimum 25 maximum 55 or thereabouts..I also had to go a bit smaller than 550-450 and fix a white border to the outside edge.

You don't have to change the proportions - you can resize/crop your layered file to 550 x 206 and change the canvas size to 550x350 - you'll end up with white bars on top and bottom which will blend in the site background.

As far as fitting into the size restrictions - open the Optimize palette (Window - Optimize), open the optimized view (tab) of your image and look at the information bar under the image. The default setting in the right-hand information field is Original/Optimized File Size. Experiment with the Color Table and Dither settings (i.e. Adaptive 128 colors / Diffusion 85%) and monitor the file size in the Optimized view. Run play to see how it affects the quality of the gif. Play some more to fit in the restrictions.

just host the gif on imageshack.us and link to it in the contest. then upload a single frame of it as the pic and tell people to go onto the link

Personally I don't like that option. To me that's doing an end-around to the size limitations on the contests. Part of the challenge is doing stuff within the limitations. Just my $.02

ok now that the contest has ended, ive remebered where this topics was and ive found somewhere to host the file this is the entry that never was:
http://img03.yourpix.org/view/05.07/22/1179869643eyes-big.gif


sorry to bump a dead topics but thought it was a waste if i was the only one to see it...

may take a while 2.7mb

last frame changed during upload....

yeah agreed. never done it myself but a few people have i think so it seemed like a reasonable option.

Cool work shame it did not make it to the contest.