Working with hybrid colours

hybrid colours are made up of alternate pixels of web safe colours

an enlargement of an image using a hybrid colour showing the alternating pixels

What are hybrid colours?
Extended or hybrid web safe colours are made by combining alternating pixels of two web safe colours in a 2x2 checkerboard pattern. This means that you can work with a palette of up to 1,331 extended web safe colours rather than the simple 216 colours of the web safe palette.

When viewed in a browser, the two web safe colours effectively 'merge' into one. The regular pattern of pixels creates this optical illusion and the impression of a single colour. This paragraph is using a hybrid colour background tile. In the paragraph above the same background tile is enlarged so that you can see the alternating pixels.

Using hybrid colours in Ignite

Set Ignite to use hybrid colours
the web safe palette pane of the Inspector To use hybrid colours in your GIF image simply go to Output view and set Extended WS to Yes in the Palette properties pane of the Inspector. Ignite will then convert your non web safe colours to hybrid colours.

Create your own
If you open the palette of your GIF by clicking the Show palette button on the Web safe palette pane in the Inspector, you can change any of your palette colours to hybrid colours by right clicking on the colour and choosing Make hybrid. Once you have hybrid colours in your palette, you can edit them by right clicking on them and choosing Edit hybrid. You can now choose which colours make up the hybrid colour.

the edit hybrid colour dialog box

Ignite has a number of useful features to help you when you are working with web safe colours. Working with web safe colours highlights some of them...