Color Picker Standard Colors
Colors attract attention and set a mood, so they are an important element in any form of visual communication. When dealing with printed forms of communication, the colors can be controlled by the printer. On the Internet, however, colors can vary from one screen to another. Web developers have come up with various lists of "standard" colors and use a tool called a color picker to choose them.
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Color Picker
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While there is actually an app called "Color Picker" (colorpicker.com), the term "color picker" generally refers to any tool that lets you choose colors. This can be a stand-alone app, an add-on for a Web browser or a tool built into graphics software. Color pickers all have these features in common: a big window filled with a color gradient and a narrower slider that has a wider range of colors, a field where you can enter the hexadecimal value of a color, and other fields that show RGB and other codes (hue, saturation, and brightness) that apply to the chosen color. Some color pickers also have an eyedropper tool you can use to sample a color from an image, the ability to generate a color scheme starting from one color and the ability to choose a foreground and background color separately.
Specifiying Colors
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There are many ways of specifying colors. In printed work, colors are often specified with RGB codes (three numbers for the values of red, green and blue within the color) or Pantone colors, a trademarked color specification system. Colors on the Internet are specified using hexadecimal codes, written with a "#" character followed by six digits. A color chart or a color picker can tell you the hexidecimal code for a given color.
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Web-Safe Colors
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On the Internet, the number of colors possible is limited by the user's computer monitor. At one time, monitors could display only 256 colors, so a standard set of 216 Web-safe colors was developed; 147 of these can be specified using a color name and all of them can be specified using a hexadecimal value. Of these, 17 are considered "standard" -- aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, grey, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white and yellow.
Web-Smart Colors
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Modern computer monitors can show millions of colors, but the problem is calibration. Just as you see a difference in colors when comparing the pictures on TV screens in an appliance store, monitors will show colors differently and have settings that uses can adjust to alter the colors shown. Some Web designers use all the colors available using the hexadecimal codes -- more than 16 million. But others advise sticking to the 4,096 "Web-smart" colors that can be specified using three pairs of identical hex digits. Thus #663300 and #33CCFF are Web smart, but #FECAFF and #235C00 are not.
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