Using Web-Safe Colors

Quick links to procedures on this page:

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To use Posterize Using Color Set to adjust color levels

Using Web-Safe Colors

Using a Web-safe color table becomes important when you expect to deliver your Web page to viewers who use monitors displaying 256 or fewer colors. On such a monitor, Web browsers dither colors that aren’t found in the Web-safe palette. So, depending on your audience, making sure that some or all of your image conforms to the Web-safe palette can make good sense.

Selecting Web-Safe Color Palettes

The colors in the default palette included with Corel Painter are the same 216 colors present in the Netscape browser-safe palette. Included with Corel Painter are Web-safe color palettes that identify colors by a hex value displayed immediately under each color chip — values used in HTML code to identify a color.

To select a Web-safe color palette

Click the Options button

in the Color Sets panel, and choose Open Color Set.

In the Select Color Set dialog box, select the Hexadecimal folder within the Color Sets folder.

Choose a hex file from the list, and click Open.

The selected color palette displays in the Color Sets panel.

Working with Posterize Using Color Set

You can use the Posterize Using Color Set option to force your image to use the default color set. Posterize Using Color Set can help make colors in your resulting image ready for delivery to the Web — without a lot of dithering or shifting of colors.

Posterizing means adjusting the number of color levels an image contains. Corel Painter can automatically constrain all the colors in your image to a Web-safe, 216-color palette. Although the Posterize Using Color Set option is not designed to be a highly sophisticated method of reducing color (it offers you no control over exactly how color reduction is performed), Posterize Using Color Set can be a real time-saver.

In addition, you can constrain the colors you use to the default or another Corel Painter Web-safe palette, utilize new Web-safe single color brushes (refer to One-Color Brushes) and keep the number of colors in your image to a minimum.

To use Posterize Using Color Set to adjust color levels

Select an area of your image you want affected or select nothing if you want the entire image affected.

Make sure the proper color set is active.

Select Effects menu

Tonal Control

Posterize Using Color Set.

It’s important to note that exporting to GIF format can compromise the color set values used when Posterize Using Color Set has been performed. For best results in those cases:

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First, save your reduced-color image in a 24-bit format, like Windows Bitmap, TIFF, or PICT. This maintains the benefits of defining Web-safe colors in Corel Painter.

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Next, open the image in a tool that supports indexed color to save the GIF — one that offers “constrain to color set” features.

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Finally, save the image to GIF format. The Web-safe colors from Corel Painter are maintained and your image is ready to go right on the Web.

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