I don't know what this is

[avram]

I keep forgetting about the screen gamma thing.

See, Mac displays are brighter than Windows/Unix displays (for values of Unix that apparently exclude OSX). That’s one reason Macs are so popular among visual artists. This guy’s jacket was much brighter on my monitor when I was working him over in Photoshop. I didn’t see the faded-out version till I invoked the Save for Web, which previews the final appearance for me as it’ll show up to most viewers. I’m pretty sure there are things I can do to get it to display that way while I’m working on the image, and I should probably get into the habit of doing them.

Comments

hrm

[jmhm.livejournal.com]

Are you going to use your stuff for print, or just on the web?

You can work in indexed colors if you absolutely must have all web-safe colors, but it'll make your print output look terrible.

I've found, honestly, that the only way to be sure is to go to your monitor set-up and just set your monitor to web-colors (or 256, if you don't have that) and work for what looks good. If you want it to print, though, try working in CMYK preview mode. It's pretty brutal about telling you what you have when your brights are gone. It doesn't track exactly with web-safe colors, but it's pretty close.

As a compromise, you could make random selections and see if your gamma alert comes up (the exclamation point over the color in the color window).

It's damn hard to work for both media at once.