Until I am able to write a formal tutorial, I will just put some notes here for those of you who would like to understand the different settings for optimizing gifs.

As most of you know, I love animated tags, so I do a lot of my saving in Animation Shop.  I've played with the settings quite a bit, and this is what I've learned.

I know that many tutorials suggest Optimized Median Cut and Error Diffusion (on the Colors tab), but the settings that I use the most are Optimized Octree and Nearest Color.  In addition to creating a smaller file size, there's less "blurriness".  The blurriness is mostly caused from the error diffusion setting.  And there's more colors available with the octree rather than median cut.

Sometimes when I work with gradients, I will use the error diffusion setting, because that creates a more gradual blending than nearest color does.  The other times to use the error diffusion setting is when you are working with backgrounds that have a fading of color like you get when you use a mask, or if your image has a glow effect.

For the Optimizations tab, I always check the middle three boxes unless I'm working with some animations on a transparent background.  You may need to UNcheck the Write Minimal Frames box or your animated parts might leave a trail or ghost (this is part of the image that is carried over when one frame changes to the next).  If you're just making a siggy with noise, then you could leave that box checked.  UNchecking the box makes your file size much bigger.

For the Partial Transparency tab, I always use convert pixels less than 1 and the blend color as white (unless I'm making a tag for a non-white background).  For an image that will be posted on a non-white background, increase the value for 'convert pixels less than'.

And another tip I would give is if you're working with non-animated pixel tags, save them in gif format rather than jpeg, because jpeg will cause blurriness and color degradation in your tag when it's not necessary.