beginner question on "index"

I very rarely use Photoshop so don’t have much experience with it. Hopefully my problems are simple for someone with experience.
I was able to create some gifs that I use as buttons on a web page and they’re okay. Now that I have more time I’d like to modify those gifs (adjust the spacing on the letters of the words) but I’m having some problems.
The first thing I notice is that when I open the .gif in Photoshop it says
[filename] [view]% (Index)
Can someone tell me what ‘Index’ means?

Boze wrote:

I very rarely use Photoshop so don’t have much experience with it. Hopefully my problems are simple for someone with experience.
I was able to create some gifs that I use as buttons on a web page and they’re okay. Now that I have more time I’d like to modify those gifs (adjust the spacing on the letters of the words) but I’m having some problems.
The first thing I notice is that when I open the .gif in Photoshop it says
[filename] [view]% (Index)
Can someone tell me what ‘Index’ means?

It means ‘indexed colors’, in contrast to ‘RGB’ or "greyscale’ or ‘CMYK’.

Johan W. Elzenga wrote:

Boze wrote:

I very rarely use Photoshop so don’t have much experience with it. Hopefully my problems are simple for someone with experience.
I was able to create some gifs that I use as buttons on a web page and they’re okay. Now that I have more time I’d like to modify those gifs (adjust the spacing on the letters of the words) but I’m having some problems.
The first thing I notice is that when I open the .gif in Photoshop it says
[filename] [view]% (Index)
Can someone tell me what ‘Index’ means?

It means ‘indexed colors’, in contrast to ‘RGB’ or "greyscale’ or ‘CMYK’.

To expand in that; you didn’t do anything. All gifs are in Index mode. If you want to modify or edit change to RGB in Image>Mode.
However, adjusting the spacing on letters will prove daunting as the type is no longer on its own layer or editable as "live" type. For this reason it is always a good practice to save an editable psd version of your file and use that to make changes, not a final output file like gif.
—

Comic book sketches and artwork:
http://www.sover.net/~hannigan/edjh.html
Comics art for sale:
http://www.sover.net/~hannigan/batsale.html

ahhh.. got it. live and learn. at least these are very simple so I can re-create them and do them correctly. thank you both!

"edjh" wrote in message

Johan W. Elzenga wrote:

Boze wrote:

I very rarely use Photoshop so don’t have much experience with it. Hopefully my problems are simple for someone with experience.
I was able to create some gifs that I use as buttons on a web page and they’re okay. Now that I have more time I’d like to modify those gifs (adjust the spacing on the letters of the words) but I’m having some problems.
The first thing I notice is that when I open the .gif in Photoshop it says
[filename] [view]% (Index)
Can someone tell me what ‘Index’ means?

It means ‘indexed colors’, in contrast to ‘RGB’ or "greyscale’ or ‘CMYK’.

To expand in that; you didn’t do anything. All gifs are in Index mode. If you want to modify or edit change to RGB in Image>Mode.
However, adjusting the spacing on letters will prove daunting as the type is no longer on its own layer or editable as "live" type. For this reason it is always a good practice to save an editable psd version of your file and use that to make changes, not a final output file like gif.
—

Comic book sketches and artwork:
http://www.sover.net/~hannigan/edjh.html
Comics art for sale:
http://www.sover.net/~hannigan/batsale.html