This section will cover the basic skills and concepts involving color palettes and their relevance to creating transparent GIF files and browser/hardware support.

    Working with colors can be one of the trickiest topics in internet graphics for several reasons. First, there will be many people viewing your site. Even if you don't register with search engines, people will find it. They will be viewing your web site from a monitor that may only be set to display 256 colors (this is the industry standard still). Others will have their monitors set to display millions of colors. The computers at our school are set to display thousands of colors. So a JPG saved and published at millions of colors will still not look as well at school here if you created it at home on a display set to millions of colors.

    One of the hardest things to accomplish in internet graphics is to produce a graphic intensive web site that looks good across any platform (MAC or PC) and at any color depth regarding the user's monitor. To add to this, the browsers only support 255 colors without calling up external multimedia support and the MAC has a different color palette all together. Intersecting these palettes only leaves 217 colors you can use whereby your site will look exactly the same regardless of who views it. The only way to make your site adhere to this standard is to load the safety color palette in Paint Shop Pro (see picture below) or leave all images at only 2 bit (black and white), or 4 bit (16 colors).

    When you reduce an image to 256 colors in PSP it gives you different mathematical ways of coming up with 256 colors. At this time we open a picture in PSP and play with these options. I will discuss the different options and advantages of each. If you are following this course on your own, please go to the PSP help file and look up dithering, color reduction options, and optimization. We will also be returning to this topic in the final lesson.

    The following picture identifies the location of color palette tools and options in PSP. The one topic I would like to elaborate on here is the use of the -set palette transparency- in the creation of GIF files. When this option is selected, the image must have already been reduced to 256 colors. The idea of background transparency can be confusing because it is often thought that the browser somehow magically detects the edge of the image and just cuts around the edges. However, this is not the case. Transparency is made by selecting only one color to be transparent. Depending on how you converted the image to 256 colors you may have made the background look like one color while it is actually 2. An example of this is the print on a newspaper. Grey can be made by spacing out pixels, or units of pigment, of black and white. So when you select one color as transparent and 2 colors are present, the image will have speckles all over it. At this point you will either have to go in and paint over the odd pixels with the color you really want transparent or backup and convert the image to 256 colors using a non-dithering method. Another option is to use a pallete color that exists in the both the 256 color palette and the larger palettes. This gets tricky and is best learned by experience. Yet another reason to keep clean copies of your files and always use the save copy of function in PSP.