Picture quality is often determined by its rendition on the user's screen. In preparing graphics for the World Wide Web, the user's browser software and screen limitations must be considered. While some users can display thousands (usually 32,768) or millions (possibly 16,777,216) of colors, others are limited to 256, or even 16. These are all powers of 2:

Whatever the limits, some browsers will reduce the rendition to a small subset of the available colors. To insure your Web output appears as you desire, pictures usually should be limited to at most 216 colors. Moreover, these should be in the so-called "Netscape Color Cube" (a subset of the Apple Standard Color Set).

These pages are designed to provide useful reference material and interactive color-selection tools for Web designers.

• The Challenge: A Sample Color Wheel with thousands of colors, under reduced display conditions
  
  
• Study: A brief but necessary tutorial on Personal Computer Color Arithmetic. Details by Cube Size with JavaScript
  
  
• Fun: Interactive JavaScript Color Cubes and Visible Spectra showing the display mathematics in action
  
  
• Reference Pages:
  • The browser 216 Color Cube and 40 Additional Colors for Macintosh.
  • The 216 color cube under Reduced Display Conditions
  • The Windows 20 colors and 16, 4, and 2 Colors
  • The 140 browser color names alphabetically and sorted by color code
  • A GIF picture with exactly 216 colors.

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