256 colors

[Beat Takeshi]

How do you work in a project at 256 colors only? I have to design screens for the TREO 650 and 600 and the 600 rez sucks so i need to keep the project real simple and see how its going to look while i work instead of keep handing the screens to the programmer and waiting for him to put it in.

 

[Michael Carter]

The way I've done it is to work in RGB, and then convert to indexed color.

Image>mode>indexed color

You'll have a choice of pallets, exact colors (which will often be less than 256 colors), etc.

If you can get the pallete info for the treo, you may be able to import that. But choosing the Mac or PC system pallete should give you a good idea. (Choosing "exact" will cheat the pallete twoards the colors used in your design... say, if there's a lot of blues, it may look better with "exact" than the final color space).

You can set up a photoshop action to do the conversion and assign it to an f Key which speeds things up for designing. Then hit "undo" and keep working.

I'd advise you to save RGB copies of everything!

Hope that helps--MC