This web color tutorial shows you how to get the colors you want for your web pages. You will learn all about web colors including RGB to hexadecimal conversion, color tags, computer system displays, browser and color palettes, the non-dithering (safe) color chart, color name charts, GIF vs JPG and graphics compression. It will help you get the results you want for the vast majority of web surfers out there, but you can't contol the myriad of settings or the particular system any user may have.

Web Colors in RGB

Everything you see, images and text, on your computer screen is made up of pixels, or squares of a single color. Typically, web graphics display 72 of these pixels per inch, or 72 ppi. (About Screen Resolution)

Each pixel can represent only one of a maximum possibility of 16,777,216 unique colors. This amazing number of colors is achieved by setting percentages of the three primary hues; Red, Green and Blue or RGB. The values, or amount of color, range from 0 to 255.

Black is achieved by setting all RGB values to 0 while the values for white are all 255. For example, the RGB value for the default blue HTML link color is 0, 0, 255. The value for red and green is 0 and blue is full at 255.

RGB to Hexadecimal Conversion

When you create a graphic for the web, you choose your colors based upon their RGB values. However, HTML will only recognize a color by its hexadecimal equivalent of the RGB values or by its color name, if it has one. Even though most HTML editors and graphics programs have RGB to hexadicimal conversion capability built into them, it might still be helpful to know how it works.

Or you can skip all that and use this RGB to Hex Converter

Hexadecimal refers to the base-16 number system, which consists of 16 unique symbols: the numbers 0 to 9 and the letters A to F. Color tags are six characters long with the first two representing red, the second two representing green and the last two representing blue. Any of the more than 16 million colors can be converted to its hexadecimal tag if the RGB values are known.

The formula for conversion is as follows for the blue RGB of 0, 0, 255:

Divide each value by 16 and multiply decimal remainder by 16

Take a look at the Browser Safe Color Chart.


Take me back to the top 

Colors in RGB | RGB to Hex | Bits of Color | Your Display
Color Palettes | Dithering | GIF and JPG | Compression