User Guide

The Web412
a highly sophisticated method of
reducing color (it offers you no control
over exactly how color reduction is
performed), Posterize Using Color Set
can be a real time-saver.
In addition, you can constrain the
colors you use to the default or
another Corel Painter Web-safe
palette, utilize new Web-safe single
color brushes (refer to “One-Color
Brushes” on page 412) and keep the
number of colors in your image to a
minimum.
To use Posterize Using Color Set
to adjust color levels:
1 Select an area of your image you
want affected or select nothing if
you want the entire image affected.
2 Make sure the proper color set is
active.
3 Select Effects menu > Tonal
Control > Posterize Using Color
Set.
It’s important to note that exporting to
GIF format can compromise the color
set values used when Posterize Using
Color Set has been performed. For
best results in those cases:
• First, save your reduced-color
image in a 24-bit format, like
Windows Bitmap, TIFF, or PICT.
This maintains the benefits of
defining Web-safe colors in Corel
Painter.
• Next, open the image in a tool that
supports indexed color to save the
GIF—one that offers “constrain to
color set” features, such as
GifBuilder (Mac OS) or GIF
Construction Set (Windows).
• Finally, save the image to GIF
format. The web-safe colors from
Corel Painter are maintained and
your image is ready to go right on
the Web.
Brushes for the Web
Natural-Media and Low
Bandwidth
Web artists are pulled between the
desire for beautiful imagery and the
need for small image file sizes, with
faster download times.
Bitmapped images can be roughly
divided into two general types—
images with areas of flat color and
continuous-tone images. Continuous-
tone images (which most of the
normal features in Corel Painter
produce) are best saved as JPEG
images. Images with flat areas of color
are best saved as GIF images. The
more regions of flat color contained in
an image, the more compressed
(smaller) the resulting GIF file. For
more information about reducing
colors in the final GIF file, refer to
“Reducing the Number of Colors” on
page 410.
The strength of Corel Painter is its
Natural-Media brushes; however,
Corel Painter is also versatile in the
creation of flat color suitable for GIF
images on the Web.
One-Color Brushes
You can set the brush controls to
create areas of flat color, while keeping
all the feeling and nuance of a
Natural-Media brush. These brush
edges are aliased, meaning they have
jagged edges. For example, if a brush