To avoid losing particular colors as you reduce the Colors setting, first select those colors in the image with the Eyedropper tool (Shift+click to select multiple colors) and click the Lock icon at the bottom of the Color Table then reduce the Colors setting. Then fine-tune your choice by typing a slightly lower number into the Colors field. Choose the lowest preset from the Colors menu that produces an image that looks good to you. Fewer colors will reduce the file size, but may cause the image to lose important details. This setting has the most significant impact on the file size and the appearance of a GIF. The Colors setting determines how many colors are included in a GIF's color palette, up to a maximum of 256 colors. Use the Mask icon next to the Reduction menu to generate different palettes for text layers, vector layers, and selections you've saved to alpha channels. Don't feel compelled to choose Web (which generates a fixed palette of the 216 "Web-safe" colors), because today most monitors are 24-bit and can display a much wider range of colors. Avoid the other choices, because they are fixed palettes unrelated to the original image and can cause a noticeable change in image color. Choose Selective, Perceptual, or Adaptive from the Reduction menu to create a palette based on the colors in your original image. The Reduction setting determines how that color palette is generated. When you optimize a file as GIF, all the colors in the original image are converted to a limited palette of colors. These formats are less popular than GIF and JPEG because not all Web browsers display PNGs correctly, and because PNG-24 files can be relatively large in file size.) (Two PNG formats are also available-PNG-8, which is similar to GIF, and PNG-24, which can contain varying degrees of transparency. Choose GIF from the Format menu, or choose a collection of GIF settings from the Preset menu. Open Photoshop's Save for Web window (File>Save for Web) A or ImageReady's Optimize palette (Window>Optimize) B.