Ken continues... So there you have it. At least FreeHand has a handle (no pun intended) on browser-safe colors. __ If you want to be perfectly assured of browser-safe colors remember that they need to be divisible by 51. Any other colors will in most likelihood dither on some people's browsers.

While these were very satisfying results, there was one more area which needed exploration. __ When setting text in bitmap art, Photoshop's type tool leaves a lot to be desired. Because of this, most designers find it necessary to set complex type in a drawing application and import it into Photoshop. Being able to do so without incurring color shifts would be a valuable asset. __ To test this capability, I exported an EPS file from FreeHand using the export setting "Photoshop 4 RGB EPS" This export format has been available since version 7, and actually specifies RGB values for the colors in the EPS file's internal color list. I thought that this would be the ticket for vector to bitmap conversions, but after opening the EPS file in Photoshop, there very slight color shifts. Color values which were supposed to be RGB 51,255,51 were actually 50,255,50. While not technically correct, these were so close as to suggest a rounding error, and possibly an easy fix. __ That fix turned out to be nothing more than a conversion to indexed color in Photoshop, using the web palette. This converts the colors to their closest web palette value, bringing them back to the original Freehand-assigned values. __ Copying and pasting objects from FreeHand to Photoshop yielded the same results. __ Freehand adds a nice touch by listing the RGB color values in its web-safe color palette in hexadecimal notation, just like they would be expressed in HTML. Maybe FreeHand really *is* The Most Powerful Design Tool for Print and Internet Graphics! Ken Now, this whole issue heats up again...

Design & Publishing . / . WEB . / . Pixelsmith

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