Color by the numbers

J
Posted By
j
Dec 1, 2006
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289
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4
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Closed
I’m having a terrific problem matching a GIF image’s color to a web background.

Before I go further I must be certain – is it true that a "web safe" color code specified for a html background should match the same "web safe" color code typed into the color selector of Photoshop?

Are all Web Safe colors rendered within the scope of GIF format?

Thanks in advance. I’m stunned by my sudden stupidity. 🙁
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SK
Schraalhans Keukenmeester
Dec 2, 2006
j wrote:
I’m having a terrific problem matching a GIF image’s color to a web background.

Before I go further I must be certain – is it true that a "web safe" color code specified for a html background should match the same "web safe" color code typed into the color selector of Photoshop?

Are all Web Safe colors rendered within the scope of GIF format?
Thanks in advance. I’m stunned by my sudden stupidity. 🙁
Web safe colours will be displayed by any web browser able of displaying colour at all (although finding one that ONLY supports web-safe colours has become more and more of an antique hunt). The idea was (when Mac & PC were even more separate worlds than today) each had their own ideas about available colours. The web safe palette was a minimum agreed set of colours whose RGB values yielded valid colours on both platforms. Other colours, valid on one of these might have been rendered as dithered colour on the other.

Between systems the actual colour displayed can be different, but on a given system colours with the same RGB value (the #RRGGBB format) look the same, as long as the displaying apps are capable of displaying colours in their so called gamut.These days most GUI apps are capable of working with all avaliable colours on a system.

While websafe colours today are a very restrictive palette, as most systems + browsers are capable of displaying many more, up to millions of colours, GIF images only supports up to 256. With 216 colours the websafe palette is a decent choice here.

The ‘new GIF’ (as far as lossless compression is concerned) is PNG. Only because microsoft’s browsers (until, finally, IE7) did not support part of the png standard (wrt transparency) PNG has had a hard time becoming a defacto standard. That will change now I suppose, with the advent of IE7. For animated images there are newer formats as well, but most if not all of them still aren’t properly supported throughout the entire range of webbrowsers, so AniGIF will be around for some time to come.

HTH
Sh.
J
John
Dec 6, 2006
I found the problem. The client showed me her web page and the background colors were not compatible with GIF colors (even when asking for ‘exact’ match.) Transparency was important. We changed the page colors ever so little to GIF safe colors (as well as Matte to match) and all is well.
N
nomail
Dec 6, 2006
John wrote:

I found the problem. The client showed me her web page and the background colors were not compatible with GIF colors (even when asking for ‘exact’ match.) Transparency was important. We changed the page colors ever so little to GIF safe colors (as well as Matte to match) and all is well.

I’m a bit puzzled. There’s no such thing as ‘GIF Safe Colors’. GIF supports only 256 colors in total, but these colors can be any colors you want, because a color table is stored in the file as well. I suppose you mean that the GIF was saved in ‘Web Safe Colors’, and the page background was not one of the 216 web safe colors.

—
Johan W. Elzenga johan<<at>>johanfoto.nl Editor / Photographer http://www.johanfoto.nl
T
Tacit
Dec 9, 2006
In article
wrote:

I’m having a terrific problem matching a GIF image’s color to a web background.

What problem are you seeing?

Before I go further I must be certain – is it true that a "web safe" color code specified for a html background should match the same "web safe" color code typed into the color selector of Photoshop?

The Web Safe palette is only useful for people who are browsing your Web site and have their video card set to 256 colors. Because this is not normally the case in this day and age, it is really not very useful.

Back in the day when most people could only view 256 colors on their monitors, the Web Safe palette was useful. It contains 217 colors that will not "dither" on Macs or PCs set to 256 color mode. You can use other colors, but on a monitor set to 256 colors, they will "dither."

The only thing the Web-safe palette is useful for is choosing colors that will not dither on a computer set to 256 colors. It is not useful for any other purpose. There is nothing special about those colors when it comes to matching an image to a Web page background; if the Web page background and the image have the same color, regardless of what it is, it should match…

….provided the computer is not set to "high color" (16-bit) mode. Because of a quirk in the way most browsers work, on a computer set to "high color," Web HTML colors are rounded one way and colors in a GIF are rounded a different way. The Web-safe palette won’t help with this; the solution is to make sure your video card is set to true color.

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