Why does gif turn into grayscale when i use the imread or the imshow command?

I didn't make the animation from mathlab. I downloaded it externally with 6 seconds of animation. Did it ACTUALLY convert my gif into a grayscale or is it just showing in matlab due to some error.

a = imread('gframe.gif');
imshow(a)

Output

[Image Analyst]

Did you read in the colormap also (the second arg returned by imread)?

[anup pandey]

yes I looked at the colormap and every color was converted into black and white

[Walter Roberson]

[a, cmap] = imread('gframe.tif');
image(a);
colormap(cmap);

Notice that I did not use a variable named colormap as that is the name of the function needed to change the current colormap.

[DGM]

This is probably relevant for anyone trying to read multiframe gifs in R2021a or newer:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/893347-is-there-a-bug-in-imread-or-imfinfo-with-multiframe-gifs-in-r2021a-b