Dithering
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December 11, 1997 | ||||||||
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Dear Gasping Because you're dithering. Now hold on, don't get in a lather, Aunt Netty doesn't mean you, she means your Netscape browser is dithering. Select Options from the Menu bar, select General Preferences, and then select the Images tab, and you will see the following options:
Unfortunately, Navigator doesn't give you much guidance about what the options actually mean. Here's what the Help screen has to say about Choosing Color: Selecting Automatic (default) lets Navigator determine the most appropriate type of color display. Select Dither to most closely match your computer's available colors. Dithered images may offer a closer match to an image's intended colors, but take longer to display. Select Substitute Colors with the closest match in the color cube.If you select Automatic, the images might get dithered, or the colours might get substituted, it kind of depends on the image you're viewing. If Navigator dithers, you might not notice any "speckling" at all, If Navigator substitutes colours, you might still get "speckling" and the colours will not necessarily be the actual colours in the image. Oh, did Aunt Netty mention that dithering or colour substitution happens most often when your computer is set to display only 256 colours? If you allow your computer to show more colours, most of your problems go away. Right-click on the Windows desktop and choose Properties (or from the Windows Start menu, select Settings | Control Panel | Display). Now click on the Settings tab, and you will see a drop-down list like this:  If your setting says 256 Color instead of High Color (16 bit), you are going to get a lot of dithering or colour substitution. Try changing your setting to High Color (16 bit) or True Color (24 bit). (Note: some older machines reputedly cannot show more than 256 colours, so you have no choice, but Aunt Netty has never seen a computer that old.)
But what exactly is dithering?
For a more detailed explanation, see
Joe Barta's
Netscape's 216 colors,
which is (only!) a small portion of a
much larger tutorial,
So, you want to make a Web Page!,
which Aunt Netty recommends for those really interested
in how web pages are created.
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