how come when I use photoshop to make a jpeg for my website and then I pull it into yahoo sitebuilder... the picture looks worse because it only allows 256 colors??? I try to "save for web..." in photoshop, and that knocks it down to 256 selective colors. This makes it look fine, if its a very low color picture... but if it has a bunch of different reds and blues and black, etc.. then it looks like crap... but I see all sorts of pictures on the web using millions of colors? what am I missing?
Dunno what Yahoo sitebuilder is doing, but those of us who simply stuff an image on our servers, we have more than 256 colours (jpg or, rarely, png). Your jpg's seem to be being turned into gif's. I don't use photoshop but I never use Save for Web in GIMP. In Photoshop, you probably have somewhere where you can change the colour indexing of your image. There should be an RGB option (that's as many colours as the image has, like 16 billion), Greyscale and Index. Index sets a number of colours, limit 255 + transparent. Either you're indexing them in Photoshop, or this Yahoo thing is doing it for you. You need to keep it in RBG mode. Is there something in the yahoo menu that mentions Mode or Index or anything?
I seem to remember the same thing happened a few years ago when I would pull an image into Adobe GoLive and then upload the pages to the web... when I would go to the web and look at my page, the image would look like 256 colors... I always use RBG when doing the image in photoshop though, I only tried indexing when saving as JPEG gave me the color problems.
It gotta be who you're uploading to then. If it's coming out of PS with 16 billion colours then that's the only thing I can think of. Some sort of auto-compression going on there?