Gradiant images..

[hstraf]

Whenever I try to do an image (using paintshop pro) that is gradient (shoot.. I can't spell!), it ends up looking really stupid.

That's because I suck at graphics. (Somehow, the more I say that.. the more numb I become...)

Anyway, I'm wondering if my gradients suck becuase I'm not supposed to be using the websafe palette. How can I make a nice smooooth gradient? Say from dark blue to light blue, without the jerky color shifts that seem to appear after I save the file into gif format?

Thanks.

[Aidan Bahta]

Using the websafe pallete will limit you to only a couple hundred colors. Try not using the websafe pallete, and safe as a jpeg instead. GIF files end up looking really bad as gradients, with larger file sizes and lower quality than JPEGs.

Good luck

[qslack]

You have two alternatives...

1) Save them as PNG-24 files. All browsers nowadays recognize them, and Netscape has for a really long time. IE hasn't recognized them until recently but if you have the Quicktime plugin then you can see them, both inline and standalone.

2) Don't use the websafe palette, as Aidan said. There are still 256 colors. That's fine for a 512-pixel-wide (or tall) image.

[smirk]

You can use png-24 if you dont mind your images being huge KB size.. I use photoshop 5.5 and the PNG save is just huge.. not very good optimization at all.

But, if its a small image, then by all means use it.

I would stick to jpgs for gradients though.

[Ace Nova]

Use JPGs for images with gradients but dont let them optimize themselves very much, every time you save a JPG file it degrades the quality of the file.

In PSP goto
File -> Export -> JPEG Optimizer