Color Count Correction
If you've ever tried throwing a party, you know that estimating is impossible. If you only order enough pizza for the 10 people you expect, then the entire senior class will show up (free pizza is a powerful lure). If you order enough olives for 150 people, only three will show up and you'll find yourself eating nothing but olives for the next month.
I'm Using Eleventeen Colors
To find out how many different colors are actually in your image, choose Colors, Count Colors Used.
Similarly, when you start an image, you might mis-guess how many colors you need. If you think you need 13 colors, you might need 130. You might start out in 16.7-million-color mode, and discover that you've only used ecru and aquamarine.
Luckily, you can change the number of colors available at any time. To increase the number of colors, choose Colors, Increase Color Depth, and select from the three options of numbers of colors.
Decreasing the number of colors is a little trickier. Choose Colors, Decrease Color Depth, and then select the size of palette that you want from the menu that appears. When you do this, the Decrease -Color Depth dialog box shown in Figure 3.5 appears.
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Figure 3.5 Reducing the color depth requires certain decisions to be made.
First, you have to choose how Paint Shop Pro selects which colors to keep and which to throw away. With the Optimized Median Cut, Paint Shop Pro makes a good guess at which colors are most important, and then matches those colors fairly well. This is usually your best choice. Optimized Octree doesn't do as good a job of picking the important colors, but it does a better job of matching the colors you do pick. Standard/Web-Safe (available only if you're reducing to 256-color mode) uses a palette made up of the 216 colors that all color Web displays can show. Windows (available only when reducing to 16 colors) uses the 16 standard colors that your operating system uses.
Hey, I Couldn't Pick Those Numbers
The color depth reduction menu includes options for 32K (geek-speak for 32,000) and 64K (64,000). These are used mainly for creating images for certain types of computers that can only display that many colors. If you do this conversion, Paint Shop Pro eliminates the extra colors, but it leaves the image in 16.7-million-color mode. So if you work more on the image, you might increase your total number of colors. If you want to end up with an unusual exact number of colors—for example, 57 or 173—choose X Colors from the Decrease Color Depth menu. It can handle any number between 2 and 256, and creates the number of colors you want using 16- or 256-color mode.
Next, choose what you want PSP to do with the colors that are in your image but won't be in your new palette. The Nearest Color option simply replaces the missing color with the nearest color that is in the palette (this makes sure that solid areas of color remain solid.) The Ordered Dither method (available only with the Standard/Web-Safe and Windows options) and the Error Diffusion method try to fake the missing colors by creating a dot pattern of different colors. For example, if you had pink in the drawing and it doesn't show up in the palette, PSP might replace the pink area with a mixture of red and white pixels. Experiment with this, and see how you like the effects.
Click OK, and Paint Shop Pro reduces the colors in your image.
The Least You Need to Know
Computers treat all colors as a numerical mixture of red, green, and blue.
When starting a new image, you have to select the background color and the number of colors in the image.
Choosing to have more colors available to you makes for larger files and slower program times.
To set the Foreground/Stroke Solid Color, click on the Available Color display. Right-click that area to set the Background/Fill Solid Color.
Clicking the Active Stroke Style or Active Fill Style panel opens a dialog box that you use to select the exact color you want from the available colors.
When working in a fewer-color mode, you can change the colors in your palette by choosing Colors, Edit Palette then double-clicking the color you want to change.