Paint Shop Trick

[Fellow Eskimo]

This may also be used for Photoshop (I think anyway). If you have an image that will be used as the main theme one of your site, a blog for instance, and you want the site to be color coordinated with the picture...heres something I learned.

Take the image in your photo editing program, and go to Blur > 'Gaussian Blur', and put in a radius of 10. This makes it really blurry, and everything is almost indisguisable. Then go to Image > Decrease Color Depth > X Colors. Put in the number of colours you need, I usually put in 4. Make sure 'Optimized Median Cut' is checked, as well as 'Nearest Color'. Then you have a template of the 4 major colours used in that image, and you can use the RGB values to match that with your website.

I dont know if thats what you mean by a tip and trick, but I like doing it for my blog. These directions are for Paint Shop Pro 8, but can probably be used for Adobe Photoshop also. Example is here: http://www.felloweskimo.net/blog

[raminia+]

Thanks for the tip. I dont' have Paintshop Pro but I tried to do similar things in photoshop. I don't know how to performe Median Cut directly in photoshop though.

I used Gaussian blur + Save as for web + GIF file + 4 colors and the results was not bad and actually interesting.

Ramin