An image palette is a collection of colors that an image uses — similar to a painter’s palette. An image palette is a subset of all the colors your monitor can display. Not all images have image palettes — only images with color depths between 16 and 256 colors have palettes that you can fine-tune and edit.
Images with a color depth of 16 million colors do not have an image palette because they can contain all the colors your computer can display. For these images, you can load an image palette to decrease the image’s color depth to 256 colors (8-bit). Loading a palette produces the same result as decreasing color depth, except that you are controlling which colors are used in the converted image. For more information about color depth, see Understanding color depth.
You can also create and save your own palettes. Preset palettes are located in the Palettes folder of the Corel PaintShop Pro program folder. When you save a palette, you can load it into other images. This is a good way to maintain consistent colors across several images. Saving a palette is also useful if you are making many color changes and want to save a backup copy of the palette.
If you are using a palette with the current image only, you don’t need to save it as a separate file because the palette colors are saved with the image itself.
Editing the palette of a grayscale image
If you edit the color palette for a grayscale image, you are prompted to change the image to 8-bit indexed color. This allows you to add color to your grayscale image.
Using the Web-Safe color palette
Corel PaintShop Pro includes a Web-safe, 256-color palette, the Safety palette. Images using this palette can be viewed without color distortion on most computer monitors. There are three ways to use this palette on an image:
Making a palette color transparent
Paletted images (those with 256 or fewer colors) do not support transparent backgrounds, but you often need a way to make part of your image transparent when you are using an image on a Web page. For example, you may have a round logo and you want the background of the Web page to display around the logo.
Most Web browsers can choose not to display one color, effectively making it transparent. In Corel PaintShop Pro, you have two ways to make a color transparent:
Edit workspace
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Choose Image  Palette Edit Palette. |
Edit workspace
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Choose Image Palette Save Palette. |
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In the Save palette as group box, select a palette format option: |
Edit workspace
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Choose Image Palette Load Palette. |
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In the Palette drop-list, click the File Locations button  . |
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Error diffusion dithering — attempts to maintain the image appearance by dithering colors that are not in the palette. Dithering places pixels of different colors next to each other to simulate missing colors. |
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Maintain indexes — assigns each color in the palette a sequential index number and does the same for each color in the image. Each color in the image is then changed to the like-numbered color in the palette. |
If you load a palette and do not like the results, you can revert to the original image by pressing Ctrl + Z to undo the action.
Edit workspace
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Choose Image Palette Load Palette. |
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In the Palette drop-list, click the File Locations button . |
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Error diffusion dithering — attempts to maintain the image’s appearance by dithering colors that are not in the palette. Dithering places pixels of different colors next to each other to simulate missing colors. |
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Maintain indexes — assigns each color in the palette a sequential index number and does the same for each color in the image, then changes each color in the image to the like-numbered color in the palette. This option is not available for 16 million-color images. |
Edit workspace
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Choose Image Palette Set Palette Transparency. |
Edit workspace
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Choose Image Palette View Palette Transparency. |
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