Converting to the Web Palette 309Web PaletteConverting to the Web PaletteWeb Design in a Nutshell, eMatter Edition- Load these colors into the Swatches Palette by choosing Replace Swatches
from the Swatches Palette submenu.
Now you can select from swatches of web-safe colors to fill areas of your graphic.
If you don’t want to create the CLUT file yourself, you can download it from
Lynda Weinman’s FTP site, as explained in the following section.
CLUT files for other graphics programs
Many commercial tools that don’t ship the Web Palette in its color selector tools
(including Photoshop) will allow you to load in palette files. Lynda Weinman,
author of a well-known series of books on web design, has created a collection of
browser-safe palette files that can be loaded into the following software packages:
All of these files can be downloaded from Lynda’s FTP site:ftp://luna.bearnet.com/
pub/lynda/.
Converting to the Web Palette
Regardless of the tools you use to create web graphics, when you convert to
Indexed Color there are a number of issues to keep in mind that should guide the
decisions you make along the way. This section takes a look at some of those
decisions, particularly regarding the use of the Web Palette. Individual tools and
their features will be discussed in the section “Survey of Web Graphics Tools.”
Selecting a Palette
The first thing you should decide is which palette to apply to the image. Standard
palette choices were defined earlier in this chapter. Your palette choice should be
appropriate to the image. Use Adaptive (or ImageReady’s Perceptual) when the
image contains photographic material or lots of blends and gradients in the
graphic. If you’ve created your graphic using web-safe colors and you want to be
certain they stay that way, or if you just want the image to look the same for all
users, choose the Web Palette.
Reducing the Number of Colors
As stated throughout this book, it is always important to keep graphic file sizes as
small as possible for web delivery. One way to reduce the file size is to reduce the
number of colors the graphic contains. When you convert to the Web Palette, the
Color Table for the graphic will contain all 216 colors, even if just a few of them
actually appear in the image. Stripping away the unused colors can reduce file size
significantly (depending on the image) without altering the appearance of the
Software Package CLUT File Name
Adobe Photoshop bclut2.aco
Paint Shop Pro netscape.pal
Photo-Paint 216clut.cpl
MetaCreations Painter clut (in Painter folder)