safe way to display gradient?

[redss]

I discovered that the great looking gradients (that I've created in photoshop) look crappy in the browser when running in 16 bit high color video mode instead of true color mode (color banding). Unfortunately, the "web safe" color palette apparently is not enough to display smooth gradients.

Does anybody have any tips on how to display smooth gradients so that they will not render color banding on high color displays?

Also, does anybody knows how photoshop is able to display the full 24 bit color palette even though my display (in windows control panel) is set to 16 bit high color?

thanks!

 

[blueark]

The 'web-safe' palette is only 8-bit, and it's not optimised for any particular color range. So, if you have a gradient, you'll need:

a: Enough colors to catch as many subtle shades in your gradient as possible.

b: A web palette optimized for your image.

If you leave your image in RGB mode and save as a JPEG with a high quality setting, that should cover all bases. If you need to use a GIF for this, either make your gradient quite small, or use 'selective' or 'adaptive' color reduction.

As for how it will look on end-user's browsers, only testing can tell you that.

Photoshop works on a 'virtual canvas'. This may be a 24-bit image. What you see on screen is a representation of that, maybe enlarged, reduced, cropped, different color depth or whatever. It is a 'window' into the actual document.