[Harnish Studios]

Well, here it is. Does anyone have any tips on how to make it look good in 16-bit color (e.g. so the background of the menu isn't off)?
http://www.harnishstudios.com/

- Brian

[zarck]

i dont run in 16bit anymore.. but i know the problem.. i think the easiest way is to create a background image like 32x32 in the solid color thats the backqround of the images=)

another way is to use transparent pngs..
think all browsers can hadle pngs nowday?

or tell the visitor to change to a higher color depth :P

[Frost]

In 16-bit, RGB values are rounded off to the nearest multiple of 8, meaning that RGB values start at 0, then goes to 8, 16, 24, 32, etc. (except for the green channel which are multiples of 4).

In photoshop, a tool that might help with this is IMAGE/ADJUST/POSTERIZE at a value of 33. This rounds off all your colors in the image to a multiple of 8 (-1 .. which is a b*tch), but you get the idea.

This will create color banding, where you'll see hard differences between colors, and as it's been mentioned in another thread about color banding in 8-bit/channel, you can use the spatter and noise filters to reduce that slightly (be sure to add those before quantizing your colors).

Hmm, yeah.

[Frost]

Oh another thing.. if you plan on using JPG, you should know that JPG is a lossful compression algorythm that finds suitable colors and often times changes them slightly to accomodate compression. So if you save as JPG, your color precision is not assured. JPGs are stored as 24-bit no matter what, and when decompressed to memory is in 24bit, but it is converted to 16-bit at display time in your browser. If the browser does not dither the image from 24 to 16bit, you will get banding not as visible in the 24bit original version, and your colors still may not match. (for instance, a value of 32 is rounded off to 32, while a value of 31 is rounded down to 24.)

If you're real hardcore about it, you can always create a GIF for your menu items where each color in the palette is quantized to a 5-bit per channel (15 bit) value... but I don't know of any tools that actually do that (not that it's very hard to implement).

Blah.

[SushiMaster]

Hey Brian :-)

Suggestions: (not necessarily related to the original question)

1) These orb things above the interface are begging to be cickable, and the buttons on the interface are begging for a mouseover state. Here's my suggestion: make the mouseover for the buttons with the text on them give the effect of the buttons being pressed. And have two places where each button can be pressed.
Here's what I mean. When you move your mouse over the bigger orb, the About button should get pressed down, and the orb turn another colour or (better yet) start glowing or both. When you move your mouse over the actual about button, the same thing should happen.

2) You also need to let the title bit be a bit more antialiased. Some of the edges (esp. the bottom white bit) are too hard. A solution for that might, or might not, be to select the shape, contract it by 1, then feather it by 1 and then delete (while retaining the brown background.

3) I would definitely add a nice sandstone/embossed noise texture for the background. I would look better and be more consistent with the interface.

Pretty nice design though! I like the colours :-)

Daniel

[Harnish Studios]

Well, I fixed the 16-bit problem!

Thank you for the suggestions, Daniel and everyone for their help!

Now...the inevitable question: What do y'all think?

- Brian