Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
checkbox, respectively, although 99 percent of the time you won't need to bother with
these settings. But if you're interested, Diffusion, the basic setting, applies dithering in a
random pattern that is the least noticeable of the choices. Pattern applies dithering in a
square pattern, something like the pattern of a halftone, and Noise is something like Dif-
fusion, except that Diffusion disperses the effect over partial adjacent pixels, while Noise
restricts it to staying within pixels. The Transparency dither options affect only partially
transparent pixels.
Web Snap and Lossy are both settings that let you tell Elements you want only the an-
tique web-safe colors in your image (see the Tip on
Tip
). Leave both these settings set to
0—there's no sense in making your GIF lose data.
NOTE
If you've used Elements 10 or older, you may notice that in Elements 13, GIF and
PNG-8 formats have longer names in the Preset menu than they used to (they have
the words “128 Dithered” added to them). They're still the same old GIF and PNG-8
you knew from previous versions.
▪
PNG-8
. This option, the more basic of your PNG choices in Elements, gives you pretty
much the same options you get with GIF.
With both PNG-8 and GIF, you get advanced options for how to display colors (specific-
ally, to have Elements generate the color lookup table, which probably doesn't mean any-
thing to you unless you're a web-design maven). The menu below the file-format menu
lists your options. You can safely ignore this menu (Elements chooses Selective unless
you change it), but if you're curious, here are your choices: Selective favors broad areas
of color and keeps to web-safe colors; Perceptual favors colors to which the human eye
is more sensitive; Adaptive samples colors from the spectrum appearing most commonly
in the image; and Restrictive keeps everything within the old 216-color web palette.
▪
PNG-24
. This is the more advanced level of PNG. Technically, both PNG formats let
you use transparency, but more web browsers understand transparent areas in PNG-24
files than in PNG-8 files. Your other save options for this format are the same as some of
those for JPEGs.
