Graphic arts clue?

[xela]

I occasionally want to make halfway decent looking web pages. Nothing very sophisticated; the html I learned twelve years ago, when tables were state of the art for layout, has always been sufficient. I've long known css would be better, and would save time in the long run, but I've never done enough web stuff for it to seem worth climbing the learning curve. A couple of nights ago someone on zephyr mentioned mollio, a set of basic open source css stylesheets, endorsing it as "styles that don't suck, out of the box". I took a look and started playing with it, and agreed that they've put together some entirely acceptable generic layouts; I particularly like one of their three-column layouts and have (just barely) started playing with it. The one thing I don't like about it is the color scheme; in particular, the predominance of red. Changing the font colors in the css files was of course trivial (though the blues I replaced the reds with still need some work). I thought changing the colors in the graphics would be trivial too. And it probably is — if you know what you're doing.

The images are both GIFS; the only app I have that can edit GIFs is GraphicConverter, which is really more a format conversion utility than an an interactive graphics editor, so maybe the problem is the program, not the images. When I open them, the only colors in the color pallet are the ones already present in the file, and I can't get another color into them by copy/paste either. I tried converting them to PNGs and had the same issue. Then converted them to JPGs, and I at last had full color pallates available. Unfortunately, replacing the red with blue turns the entire colored area the same shade of blue, losing all the original's shading. (I did this with the bucket tool, which I expect to change pixels of the same color as and contiguous with the pixel I apply it to.)

So, do I just need a real graphics editor, instead of GraphicConverter? If so, can anyone recommend a good free or shareware one? (Mac OS, unix, or Windows, in order of preference.) Is there some other format I should be looking at, perhaps one where the file format is more-or-less human readable and I could alter the colors by editing hex color codes, which is much more my speed than graphics widgets? Or is what I"m trying to do just not as trivial as I thought it was?

Comments

[crs.livejournal.com]

GIFs have a pallete of colors associated with them. So you have to expand the color selection, or simply edit the pallete in place, changing what the numbers in the GIF convert to as colors. Think paint-by-number, really.

The Gimp is available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. I've not used it much but I know a lot of people swear by it. At a glance, it seemed to me to be one of those programs in the category of "more powerful than friendly," but that was years ago.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I downloaded Gimp for the Mac the other day and couldn't make heads or tails of it. People who like the Gimp tend to talk about it as a photoshop replacement, and even when I was making my living doing tech support at publishers and ad agencies, photoshop always left me scratching my head. (Of course, even thought I've been using unix for 17 years now, I've been using Macs longer, and still have the long-term Mac user's tendency to never even think to read the docs: If the UI isn't intuitively obvious and nobody's paying me, I tend to just punt an app. So I can't really claim to have given the Gimp an entirely fair chance. Maybe I'll look at it again tomorrow. Thanks.)

[jered]

I tried to do almost exactly the same thing you wanted, and ran into the exact same "GraphicConverter is not an editing tool problem". I wanted to make "green eggs" from a fried egg stock photo (plug for iStockPhoto.com here).

The right solution really is Photoshop. MacGIMP is an acceptable substitute. Both require training, experience, or luck, sadly.

By some stroke of luck I figured out how to do this in about 10 minutes, though. From an image window, you want Filters->Colors->Map->Map Color Range. The Preview window will make it apparent how to use it.

[crs.livejournal.com]

I swear 20 years ago there were free GIF editing programs that allowed you to do stuff like that, things that ran on DOS and were full-screen and took advantage of the spanking new VGA 256-color palletes...

20 freaking years ago.

How far we've come :)

[motodraconis.livejournal.com]

Can't help you, I use photoshop, Maya and Dreamweaver for my website, but then my site is all about artwork taped together with basic html, rather than the other way round, so Dreamweaver is ideal.
In as much as I've ever dabbled in other graphics programs, I've always found them frustratingly basic compared to Photoshop, and can't imagine why anyone would want to deviate from The One True Way of Photoshop. (Arf.)

Maybe an old version of Photoshop with a tutorial manual to work through? Even an ancient version of Photoshop is still great and should be less complicated, I'm a huge fan of tutorial books myself.

[kareila]

I found it to be worth investing some time to figure out Photoshop. You don't have to dive into the full program; Photoshop Elements is relatively cheap and has a reduced feature set, as well as a "Quick Fix" mode. I still use GraphicConverter too, but only when it's the right tool for the job.