You can modify the color depth of the animated cursor. Click on "View cursor properties" in the Tools panel and click the Change button.

The number of colors may be increased or decreased: use the radio buttons of the dialog box to select the new pixel format for the cursor frames.

AniTuner displays both the original first frame and the result of the color operation, so you can compare them.

When you press OK, all frames of the animated cursor are automatically converted to the new color format.

About the options

Add a semi-transparent XP shadow: this option is only available if you convert the animated cursor to the 32-bit format (24-bit + 8-bit for the alpha channel) supporting partial transparency. Animated cursors in this format are only handled by Windows 2000, XP, Vista or higher, though AniTuner draws 32-bit cursors correctly even if you are running it under a previous version of Windows.

Example: we converted a 256-color cursor to a 32-bit cursor and enabled the "XP shadow" option:

8-bit:
32-bit:

You can see a small gray shadow: this can be done thanks to the alpha channel available with 32-bit animated cursors.

Try to keep background transparency (advanced users):

In case of a color reduction, the background color may be changed too, and some pixels that were previously considered as transparent may become non-transparent after the reduction. If you enable the "Keep background transparency" option, AniTuner will then replace the color of all transparent pixels with the new transparent one.

When decreasing colors, you will generally lose quality, although AniTuner tries to find the best colors that suit each frame. Decreasing colors is not recommended, as you will probably have to touch up all frames manually in order to get a better result.