l actually do not sharpen my gifs at all and have never tried it? Also, I don’t know what topaz denoise is, so you are correct that I don’t use it orz. Anyway, I have this gross dislike for gifs that look too pixelated, and I always assumed sharpening them would do that? Um… I know it doesn’t directly answer your ask but I took it as a chance to test something out? Basically I made the three gifs below on PS CS3 with the exact same colour scheme, frames, and frame rate. The difference with them however, should effect the sharpness of the gif.

1) This is the way I usually make gifs. Something to note is that I only resize the gif to 500px after hitting “Save for Web & Devices,” under this tab.

2) This gif was resized using the “Image Size” option. It’s hard to see but the colours look a bit washed out, and at least imo, make the gif appear blurrier.

3) I sharpened this gif. Basically you have to go through every layer and frame (make sure you highlight both!) and hit sharpen. So as you can see in this screenshot, I have layer 1, frame 1, and the sharpen option highlighted. You literally have to do that for every frame so it’s time consuming. T_T Idk, it actually doesn’t look that bad, but I still think it looks a bit abrasive for me. Like the pixels in the skin are more obvious and the colours washed out slightly again…

Uh so results of this lame experiment for me? Don’t resize your gif before saving and use a really high quality vid. I rarely use youtube videos unless they are 780p and above. Also, I personally do not like the way sharpening looks but if you do, the steps to doing it are kind of covered above. :P