Any way to keep the red from getting so washed out when saving as .gif
from this to that

Provide your own palette with that specific shade. Load the current gif, get the colormap, and convert to palette. edit the palette, replace one of the color by the shade you want. Then open the RGB version of the image, and, convert to indexed providing your palette.

Convert the image to indexed yourself before saving as GIF using Floyd-Steinberg (normal) or Floyd-Steinberg (reduced color bleeding) dithering method.


GIFs are limited to the max of 256 colors, use web-optimized palette, gifs are mostly for web display, anyway.