This lesson deals primarily with color and color selection methods. Because this is a beginner's course, we are not going to go into all the intricacies of working with color and understanding color theory. Photoshop Elements only includes a few color modes compared to the full version of Photoshop. For the most part, you will always be working in the RGB color mode, but Elements also supports indexed color, grayscale, and bitmap color modes.
- RGB stands for red, green, blue and is the color space used most often in graphics software.
- Indexed color images have a palette limited to 256 colors or less. Index color mode is used for many web images because the reduced color palette makes the file size smaller. The Web Safe Palette is often used with indexed color images.
- The Grayscale mode uses up to 256 shades of gray to represent an image. Converting an image to grayscale mode is one way to create a black and white image. When you convert to grayscale, each colored pixel in an image is converted to a shade of gray that represents the pixel's brightness, or luminosity.
- Bitmap color mode uses only two colors to represent an image: black and white. There are no shades of gray so this type of image is also referred to as line art. Bitmap images are rarely used today.
Before you dig in to this lesson, I strongly suggest you familiarize yourself with some additional terminology and basic concepts in the following article:
Color Talk
An introduction to color in print and on the Web, from Desktop Publishing Guide Jacci Howard Bear. Be sure to read all five pages.