Color Matters - Computers. Efg's Color Reference Library -- Color and Computers. Color Matters - Color and Computers. (Revised, 2011) These images represent a range of what any given image may look like to someone viewing this web page today. Therefore, an image that looks good on one computer might look completely different on another. The image at the far left is true to the real colors, the second one from the left represents a very limited color palette (due to the computer's color capabilities or the wrong file format), the third from the left is a much lighter version of the first one, and the last image on the right represents a very bad color distortion caused by a very old monitor. Does true color matter? Consider this: If you visit a clothing store on the Web and see a blue shirt, you are out of luck if you think that the shirt is really that shade of blue.
Also, if you're visiting a museum on the Web to view Matisse's paintings, or researching skin diseases, or analyzing a satellite weather photo, you may not be seeing the correct colors and you may be getting incorrect information. 1. 2. 3. A. Color Matters - Color and Computers - The Web-Safe Color Palette. Although computers have a capacity for at least 256 colors, only 216 colors are common to all older computers. Newer computers are equipped with 64 thousand colors (16-bit) and the highest quality systems deliver 16.7 million colors (24-bit). However, approximately 10% of all computers are limited to 256 colors (8-bit). In the early days of the world wide web, the web-safe 216 color palette emerged. The image below is the most accurate representation of the palette.
Even though it's small, you can magnify it after you download the graphic. It's a nice surprise ... so it's worth the time to download the graphic and open it in any graphic application such as Photoshop. (You can save the graphic of this palette by following the sequence for your computer's saving and downloading of a graphic. These are web-safe greens from the 216 color palette. You are limited to a certain range of greens (including these) if you address the web-safe range of hues. You might also be interested in: Color Matters - Color and Computers - Gamma. Gamma affects how a computer generates images. Colors viewed on a computer with "uncorrected" gamma will appear different from those viewed with a corrected gamma.
Compare the differences in the images below. (Note: 16-bit color and fully corrected gamma is required for the most accurate viewing of these images.) How do you define gamma? Gamma is one of the most difficult computer terms to define. 1. 2. 3. 4. Or, think of it this way: When expressing a color in RGB (red, green, blue), what we are specifying is the amount of light which will be emitted from each phosphor, as a fraction of full power. 5. 6. The cathode ray tube (CRT) in your monitor See Computer Color Tips for information about CRT's and input voltagethe hardware look up table (LUT)the overall output (This final gamma measurement may represent a corrected or uncorrected gamma figure.)
The gamma measurement we are really concerned about is the overall output. 7. How uncorrected gamma affects the colors in images Advertisement. Color Matters - Color and Computers. You could say that most computers are color blind on the World Wide Web. No one is seeing the same colors. Although some see colors better than others, color accuracy poses a real challenge. Before we look at those differences, there are four tests that you can take to see how your computer color vision rates. Tests for Computer Color Accuracy 1. A test for a pure white pixel Hold a piece of pure white paper perpendicular to your monitor screen.
Consider this: Even if you have perfect color vision, if you're wearing sunglasses, you will still see thousands of colors, but those colors are not the actual color. 2. The image below allows you to directly estimate the gamma of your display system. Source and more information:Berger/Gamma Most PCs have a gamma of roughly 2.5 and many do not provide sufficient gamma correction. Macintosh computers have corrected gamma - either from its built-in graphics card (Mac) or hardware (previously found in Silicon Graphics and NeXTStep computers). 3. 4.