Make Sure You See It The Same Way They See It
If you’re designing Web graphics on a Macintosh, you can be sure they’re going to be viewed by lots of people using a PC, and vice versa. A design problem arises because the monitors on Macs and on PCs display with different levels of brightness. For example, if you design Web graphics on a Macintosh, they’ll look more than 10% darker when viewed on a PC using Windows. Photoshop will let you see an approximation of how those graphics will look when viewed on a PC. Here’s how: Choose Save for Web from the File menu. Then, at the top right of the preview window you’ll see a pop-up menu called the Preview Menu. From that menu, choose Standard Windows Color to get a preview of how your currently opened graphic will look when viewed on a standard Windows monitor. Windows designers can do the same thing and view how their Web graphics will look when viewed on a Mac (they’ll look lighter). Knowing how your graphics will look on each platform will help you find a happy middle ground that looks good on both.