Web-Safe Colors

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When the majority of monitors could display only 256 colors, a Web-safe color palette was generally used when adding color to flat color images, such as backgrounds, text, logos, and vectors you drew as well as buttons. The Web-safe palette of 216 colors displays in the major browsers without dithering and displays the way you designed it. Dithering means combining colors to produce alternative colors (not to be confused with the Web dithering option in Fireworks MX, which dithers Web-safe colors). You can recognize Web-safe colors by their hexadecimal numbers, which contain three sets of 00, 33, 66, 99, FF, or CC. To make it easy to use Web-safe colors, Firework's default color picker in every color box uses the Web-safe palette.

When designing a Web site for the masses, you want it to look its best for the widest audience possible. This is where the 216 Web-safe color palette comes into play. These 216 colors don't degrade on a monitor that can display only 256 colors. Many designers today are not as concerned about this problem as they were a few years ago, because more and more people are upgrading to better system monitors with better video cards, supporting millions of colors. However, good monitors are less expensive and more available in the United States than in many other countries that are online, so this reasoning does not necessarily apply to the global audience on the Web. The choice to use Web-safe colors or not is up to you, but keep in mind that a lot of new "consumers" are buying computers mainly to get online. Many of these new users can barely use their mouse, much less check and change their monitor settings.

Tip 

If you want to sample a color and automatically convert it into a Web-safe color, simply hold the Shift key as you sample.

Also, if you click in a color box and decide you don't want to change a color, you can press the Esc key on your keyboard to close the color palette.

Finding non-Web216 colors

You can easily check an entire document or project log (see Chapter 21 for how to use the Project log) for Web-safe colors within Fireworks by using the Find and Replace feature. To begin the search, follow these steps:

1. Open the Find and Replace panel, shown in Figure 16-3, by choosing Edit ® Find and Replace (Control+F (Command+F)).

   
   Figure 16-3: The Find and Replace panel

2. Choose Search Files and locate a file you want to check for Web-safe colors.

3. In the Find area, choose Non-Web216.

4. More options appear. In the Apply area, you have the choice of applying the color change to only the Fill, Strokes, or Effects, to all the Fills and Strokes, or to All Properties.

5. Click All Properties.

6. Click the Find button. The document you chose opens and the first area with a non-Web-safe color is highlighted. Click Replace. If you want to, automatically accept all the changes instead of accepting one at a time.

7. Click Replace All.

This tool is quite a time-saver if you have a Web site you are upgrading for someone, or one that you want to convert to Web-safe colors.

Using the Color Mixer

Fireworks offers several color models from which you can choose. The default color model is the Web-safe one: Hexadecimal RGB (Red, Green, Blue) values based on a range of values from 00 to FF. You can change color models by accessing the Color Mixer (Window ® Color Mixer), opening the Color Mixer Options menu, and choosing another color model. Table 16-1 shows the available color models.

Table 16-1: Color Models

Color Model	Description
RGB	Includes up to 16.7 million 24-bit colors. Each RGB component has a value from 0 to 255 where 255-255-255 is white.
Hexadecimal	RGB Hexadecimal values, uses a hexadecimal value from 00 to FF, where 00-00-00 is black and FF-FF-FF is white.
CMY	Print designers may be more comfortable using a CMY (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow) model. It's not the same as CMYK but similar, it doesn't have the additional black component.
HSB	Hue, saturation, and brightness. Hue has a range of degrees of 0-360. Saturation uses a percentage of 0-100 percent where 100 percent is pure white. Brightness has a range of 0-100 with 0 being black.
Grayscale	256 tones from absolute white to absolute black.

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