🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4jsbc9$r79@news1.io.org>, gmead@io.org (Glen Mead) wrote:

> Hi All,
>  
>   First of all, with respect to WWW page design, what limitations should I 
> keep in mind (IE. file formats, colours etc) when creating graphics and 
> textures for the web?  Also, how does Netscape (and others) handle a web page 
> with 2 16.7 million colour palette JPEG's and a series of 256 colour gif 
> buttons?  Does it remap all of them to match a single colour palette of the 
> same depth as the system it's being accesed with?  If that is the case, is it 
> best to stick with 256 colour (or less) gifs all with the same palette
to make 
> graphics more efficient?  I've seen a web page (designed by a friend) in
which 
> the individual images look spectacular but once on the page together, they 
> look grainy.

First off, remember that most users are connecting at 14.400 with dialup
providers, so pages full of big grafx over a highly detailed multicolor
pattern that takes forever to load are likely to be avoided, no matter how
cool design is... GIF is the standard of course, and its limitation to 256
colors makes it suitable for logos, buttons and graphic elements that use
little color variety, but still is wise to reduce its palette as much as
possible, i.e. if your logo is just 4 colors, you can get away with a
16-color gif (allowing some extra colors for antialiasing). If you need to
show complex grafx (3D renders, realistic textures with gradiations,
photographs) you'll likely need to use JPEGs, which are >way< smaller but
have to be uncompressed by the user's machine, and this may slow down
display if it is a wimpy CPU... 
Remaping: indeed all grafx on a page are mapped to the screen mode of the
user's machine, so if he/she has a Mac with a 24bit display all grafx will
look beautiful, but someone using just 8-bit (256 cols.) on a Mac or
Windoze will have see a lot of dithering. In fact grafx can vary widely
when displayed on the same machine  if using different browsers, so
checking your page on as many systems/browsers as possible is your best
bet for avoiding nasty surprises if you need truly accurate designs...

>   Second, are there any programs (either stand alone or as features within 
> another program)or tables to convert Pantone colours to RGB?  At work I tried 
> selecting a Pantone colour in CorelDraw 4.0 as a fill colour, then I changed 
> from the Pantone palette to an RGB palette and recorded the RGB values. 
Then, 
> I took the colour values over to our SGI and the resulting colour was nothing 
> like the colour I was looking for.

So your client wants to see his great logo on a RGB screen with its
Pantone colors exactly matching those of the glossy printed brochure he
mails, right? Well, its just about impossible to match >reflected<
(printed) colors to those >emanating< from a RGB monitor, the best you can
get is approximations, and if to that you add that everybody has a
different gamma on his monitor, well... I use Photoshop and Illustrator's
Pantone video simulation features (via Macintosh ShapeShifter emulation on
my A4000) for >approximating< Pantone swatches in RGB, and believe me,
you'll go blind if you try to match pixels and paper...

-- 
Victor Vargas G.  €Amiga 3D animation & video graphics/Mac DTP€