Using Director > Color, Tempo, and Transitions > Controlling color > Solving color palette problems |  |

Solving color palette problems

When images in your movie appear with the wrong colors, you probably have the wrong color palette active. Color palette problems occur only if you are using 8-bit bitmaps and you want your movie to be displayed correctly on 256-color systems (8-bit bitmaps always appear correctly on computers set to display thousands or millions of colors).

Eight-bit bitmaps don't store information about actual colors; they identify colors by referring to positions in the current color palette. When saving an 8-bit bitmap, a graphics program creates a palette with the colors required for that particular image. This palette is saved with the file and must be active when the bitmap appears in a Director movie for the bitmap to appear with the proper colors. Only one palette can be active at once. Whenever it's necessary to display more than one 8-bit bitmap on the screen at one time, as is often the case in Director movies, all the images must refer to the same palette.

To solve color palette problems, follow these guidelines:

| To avoid color problems in movies for the Web, map all 8-bit bitmaps in your movie to Director's built-in Web216 color palette. This is essentially the same palette used by Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
| Do not attempt to change palettes while a movie is playing in the browser. The browser, not the Director movie, controls the palette. Browsers ignore all palette channel settings.
| Make sure all 8-bit images that are on the Stage at the same time refer to the same palette.
| If bitmaps are not dithering or remapping to the current palette, make sure the Remap Palettes If Needed option in the Movie tab of the Property Inspector is selected. See Setting Stage and movie properties.
| Make sure there are no palette changes in the palette channel that you are unaware of. For example, when a cast member you are placing on the Stage has a palette different from the currently active palette, Director adds the new palette to the palette channel. If you don't realize that this has happened, you may find the palette changing unexpectedly when the movie plays.
| For disk-based movies, simplify your work and avoid frequent palette changes by mapping all the images in your movie to as few palettes as possible.
| Remap existing cast members to a new color palette using the Modify > Transform Bitmap command.
| If the Import option for Palette is not available while you are importing an image, the image's palette may not meet standard system requirements. Use an image editor to make sure the image's palette meets the following requirements: The palette must contain exactly 16 or 256 colors. The first and last colors in the palette must be black or white, and there must be only one black and one white in the entire palette.
| Don't change colors that are used by your system software for interface elements. In Windows, these colors always appear as the first ten and the last ten colors in the palette.