Convert GIF to JPG

Some GIFs are photographs: a portrait, a product shot, a frame of film. They were forced into 256 colours when they became GIFs, and they look grainy as a result. For those, JPG is a natural home. The file gets smaller and is accepted everywhere a photo is.

Other GIFs are drawings: logos, icons, diagrams, pixel art, screenshots of text. JPEG is the weakest format for these, because it smears a faint haze along every hard edge. If the destination allows it, convert such a file to PNG instead, which copies it exactly. Use JPG for a drawing only when a form leaves you no choice, and keep the quality at 90 or above.

To fake more than 256 colours, the software that made a GIF scattered dots of two colours next to each other, a technique called dithering. Look closely at a photographic GIF and you will see a fine speckle across skin and sky. A JPEG encoder treats that speckle as detail and spends bytes preserving it, so the JPG can come out larger than you expect and still look grainy.

There is a simple improvement. Reduce the picture a little in Resize, to 70 or 80 percent. Scaling averages neighbouring dots back into smooth tones, which is roughly what the picture looked like before it was dithered, and the JPG becomes both cleaner and much smaller.

A GIF with a transparent background was made to sit on some particular page. Filled with white, a dark-coloured logo looks fine, while a white or pale one disappears altogether. Set the fill colour in the editor to match where the picture is going, or to contrast with the artwork if you only need to see it. Because GIF edges are hard, there is no soft blending into the new colour; a fringe of the original page colour around the artwork, if the GIF has one, will remain visible.