Unlock gif image in Photoshop

What is the problem?

One common problem that photoshop users are facing is working with a gif file in photoshop after importing the image to the program.

you import a gif file into photoshop, and trying to edit it such as resize the image, you’ll see it won’t be smooth as a regular image editing.

for example, let’s take this tutorial’s icon.

here’s the original image:

and after resizing it to let’s say 40×40, here’s the bad quality result:

you can see clearly that the quality is really bad.

in addition, you can do any edditing action except really few.

What cause the problem?

the gif file is basicaly in indexed color mode. in this mode, you can’t really edit the content of the image in the original document of it as already mentioned in the last paragraph.

you can see it when you save something as a gif file:

What’s the solution for that problem

The solution for this problem is really simple. as I said earlier in this post, the imported gif file is in the ‘indexed color’ mode. what you’ll need to do is to turn this mode into the mode you’re regular to work with.

this mode called ‘rgb color’ mode. the actual simple action you need to do is the following:

go to image > mode and then choose from the list the ‘rgb color’ option.

that’s it! you can edit your gif image file as you want without having problems at all!