GIF image files are created with a color palette, much like you would have if you were to paint a picture and have a color palette to mix your paints on. The only catch is, a GIF palette only has room for 216 colors. Sort of. The Windows operating system takes up a few of those colors, so you actually have less than that.

Here's the deal; let's say you're going to be painting a picture on canvass of a beautiful sunset. You find the perfect location, and set up your gear. But there's a catch: your palette only has room for 216 colors total. Even worse, the colors have already been assigned to you and they aren't the colors you need!

What do you suppose the results are going to be? Not what you have in mind, for sure! This is what happens in MIC if you use the default color palette.

What you need is the ability to choose the palette colors yourself. But you must pick them carefully and make sure they are the exact colors you need because remember, you only have room for less than 216 of them - and you're stuck with those.

So you pick your colors very carefully, put them on your palette and proceed to paint your painting. Now it looks like you intended. Or at least it's very close. I mean, it would look even more lifelike if you had room for say, thousands of colors. But for now, 216 looks pretty good.

So what does all this have to do with saving a GIF image in MIC? Simply this: if you save a GIF image with the default color palette, the colors in that palette have already been selected for you and they are probably not the colors your image needs. What you need to do is create a custom palette that has been optimized for only the colors you need to render your sprite. That way, your image will render as close to your original as possible, under current technology.

But wait, there's something else. The more colors you use, the bigger the file size (or at least that's how it supposed to work) will be. So if your image can look acceptable with a palette of 16 colors instead of 216, your file size will be smaller and make for a faster download.

Just keep this in mind: smaller is better. Really. Is that your wife I hear laughing in the background? Ignore her. Smaller is better when it comes to GIF palettes. Would I lie?