I'm learning how to animate with Photoshop but I sometimes end up with a result that has a lot of speckles (grainy) in it. Can anyone tell me what causes this and how I can fix it?

Since I haven't posted enough forum topics yet, I can't paste an example into this message but if you go to Myspace and do a people search of "Roger Hendrix" (then click on "Apollo 13"), go to my profile, go to my photos, and look in the "Animated Assault" album, you can see specific examples of the type of problem I'm having. Any advise you can give me would be greatly appreciated

up the number of colors

if you are using imageready play around in this pannel,

The colors are at max (256, I believe). I've found that if I pull back "dither" to 0%, the graininess is reduced but is still there. The graininess is even more pronounced when the GIF is viewed as an icon (not completely opened up to it's full size).

It seems that my problem can best be described as "grainy ghost shadows" - LOL!

For example, if I'm animating a slug sliding across the screen it leaves grainy ghost shadows everywhere the slug has been.

Does that make sense? (lol)

.jpg artifacts? or did you do a bad job cutting out before you animated?

What are .jpg artifacts?

Nope. I'm sure that I've done a good job of cutting it out. I always cut out pictures manually using the polygonic lasso. In fact, I'm almost to the point of obssesive-compulsive about it.

If you go to my Myspace pictures, in the "Animated Assault" photo album, the picture called "Animal Infidels" is a perfect example.

<img src="http://c3.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images02/10/l_7720d69e7897476c80957393b6f0a88a.gif" />

myspace, i was looking on facebook, silly me, jpg artifacts are the pixels that build up around an object that has been loaded and reloaded a few times,
send me the link via pm, i'll upload it for you

sorry, you still have to wait 24 hours too

Is it only grainy after uploading to myspace? If so it's because myspace sucks at compression. A lot.

it's not made in image ready, some free standing .gif maker trial?

It may be the fact that Myspace compression sucks. I've never posted one anywhere else since photobucket doesn't allow .gif files. If you have any suggestions about other places that you can post .gif's to, I'll try it.

I'm animating with Photoshop CS3 and selecting "animation" in the "window" menu in order to create animations.

photobucket allows ,gifs under 1mb yours is 72 frames and 1.7 mb