Color Blenders 315Web PaletteColor BlendersWeb Design in a Nutshell, eMatter Editionsize. In general, with Web Scrubber you will find that you can maintain higher
quality at a lower bandwith.
When you are done “scrubbing” an image, convert it to Indexed Color using the
Exact palette and Save As or Export to GIF format.
Color Blenders
The problem with the Web Palette is that it only has 216 colors to choose from
(and they probably wouldn’t be your first choices). If you are bored with your
color options, you may want to try a new type of graphics utility called acolor
blender. Color blenders approximate any RGB color by mixing two colors from the
Web Palette in a tiny checkerboard pattern. You can use these “hybrid colors” to
fill areas of graphics or to create a background tile.
Two color blender tools exist as of this writing: ColorSafe from BoxTop Software
(http://www.boxtopsoft.com/) and DitherBox from RDG Tools (http://www.dith-
erbox.com/). Their features and interface are nearly identical, but DitherBox is
somewhat less expensive. DitherBox is also now included as part of Adobe Imag-
eReady 1.0. You can download free demo versions for either the Mac or Windows
at their respective sites.
The Pros and Cons of Color Blenders
No technology is either all good or all bad, so let’s look at the ups and downs of
color blenders:
Color blender advantages
- They allow you to choose colors off the beaten path of the 216-color web-
safe palette, yet still be certain they will look the same on 24- and 8-bit moni-
tors.
Figure 17-4: WebScrubber filter dialog box