WEBTV Manual-Using Colours

Choosing colours for viewing in the WebTV system is more difficult than for a web page viewed on the computer monitor.
There is a limited number of "TV Safe Colours" that can be used. Some of the colours are a subset of the "Web Safe Colours" .
The gamut of the NTSC TV colours is much smaller than the Web colour set.

The colours may look fine when viewed in the WEBTV emulator and viewed with the computer monitor, but are very very different when viewed on the actual TV set.
So you have to juggle four factors, a choice of TV safe colours, Web safe colours , colours that look good on the TV set and when the final colour is chosen, if the colours will be dithered!

Remember, the colour balance, brightness and contrast settings for the TV set will vary from household to household. . So choose colour schemes that are not vital to the viewing, unless your company logo is a sacrosanct thing. (Coca Cola red is a definite coulour that the magazines and photographers must follow!)

Hint	Select WEB safe colours and then apply a NTSC filter or converter found in Photoshop 5.5 or AfterAffects 4.x.

WEBTV Developer web site has an excellent Wizard that converts Web Safe colours to NTSC safe colours. Go to the WEBTV Color Picker (http://developer.webtv.net/design/tools/colorpick/Default.htm).

A "Final" Word About Choosing Colours
Select backgrounds that are dark such as black, dark blue, dark green and very very dark red.
Choose contrasting colours for the text.
Don't use yellow since WebTV will automatically change any link colour (the default blue or any colour you may have set by using Cascading Style Sheets) to the default orange-yellow colour.
Then choose the contrasting text colours from the Safe TV colour palette.

As a general rule, colours that work best for InteractiveTV are the cool tones of blue, green and violet. Warm tone of red, yellow and orange tend to bleed or crawl.

Choose a colour and try adjusting hue, saturation and luminance. The maximum saturation for any color should never be grater than 80% (Using HSB scale for colours). Once chosen, apply the NTSC filter or use the Colour Picker and look at the resulting colours on the TV screen.

In the final analysis select colour schemes that are not in critical area, such as Navigation buttons and text.
For instance a good colour scheme would be to use a dark blue background with medium yellow type.
This will probably be translated in the TV screen to anything from a very dark blue with white type or a very light blue with bright yellow type. Or any possible combination thereof.

In addition, the viewed colour of text or line depends on the background, adjacent colours or the thickness of the stroke. Blue or red will tend to bleed on a white background yet appear passable on a black background.

A note about white...Never create Web Pages with a white background i.e. #FFFFFF. White is very hard on the viewers eyes and may present problems with overmodulation. If you must use white then try a grey, say #F0F0F0. Although it is not a "Web Safe" colour, it gives the appearance of "whiteness" .

Rember your well defined colour palette in the gif image you created may be turned into a jpg by the WEBTV software. So it is best to use jpg images from the very beginning. This will get rid of the confining "Web Safe" colour need.

REFERENCES
1. Chapter 9, Selecting Colours for Microsoft TV, "Building Interactive Entertainment and E-Commerce content for Microsoft TV, by Peter Krebs, Charlie Kindschi, Julie Hammerquist. Published by Microsoft Press, 2000.
ISBN 0-7356-0628-5
2. Avoiding Color Distortion on Television: http://developer.webtv.net/design/satcolor/

Intercast Broadcast Ontario Project
	USING COLOURS