256-color GIF looks ugly on some computers

[kit kalen]

I saved a graphic for a customer's web site as a 256-color GIF, and it looks beautiful on the computers I've looked at. But my customer insists it looks pixelated and jagged. They sent me a screen shot of it and it does look pretty ugly. But I'm not understanding why the image wouldn't be just as beautiful on their screen as on others. Their site is a members-only site so thousands of others will be viewing it and they want to make sure it will look great for everybody. Both of their computers use Windows XP. I've checked it on my Mac and on Windows XP and they both look great.

Any ideas what is going on, or what I can do to appease my customer and everybody else?

[Kor]

If your customer (and any other user) uses his display on a low resolution (800x600 or under), or a low color quality (16 bit or under), or a low frequency, it is his fault, not yours... You can not build beautiful images for medieval displays and/or medieval computers... On the other hand there might be a seed of justice in your customer's view, it depends on how you worked on those images... Can we see the shots?

[kit kalen]

Thanks for the validation. It is a difficult thing developing so that everybody sees something that is equally as attractive and functional. In any case, last night I went back to the images and saved them using a few different configurations within Photoshop and one of them worked well for this customer. And if he's happy, I'm happy. Thanks for your willingness to take a look at them.

[Kor]

Usually things like that happen when you copy somebody else's GIF and you try to change its size. Good drawing is to be made say in CorelDraw, not in Photoshop, as Photoshop does not excel in such operations :-)

[tobiaseichner]

Alternatively you may try an other format, like PNG saved in "millions of colours". It also provides good compression and is supported on all recent webbrowsers.

JPEG may be also an option, especially since you can set a custom compression level, so it is finally up to you whether to prefer quality output or a faster load time and reduced file sizes.

Basically I would state the following recommendation:

Logo, graphic text: GIF
High quality photos, photorealistic drawings: JPEG or PNG


Tobias.

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