Color Coding

It's been two and a half years since I started putting together weekly information slides for the electronic bulletin boards at my church and parish center.  Each week I figure out the events to highlight, use Microsoft Paint to come up with the slides, and save them as JPEG files. I load the files onto flash drives, then go up to church and put one flash drive in each of the three monitors.

Sometimes when I'm making a slide I start with a patterned texture or background, but other times I find a clip art that fits the theme and build around that. That's what I did this week, when I was preparing a slide for a parish garage sale that's taking place next month. After I copied and pasted the "Garage Sale" graphic in the middle of the drawing area, I filled in the background with a deep maroon color and added text.

When I was done the slide looked acceptable, but I thought maybe it would get more attention with a brighter (maybe even a neon) background color. I know next to nothing about the different color formats, but I've learned that Paint uses the RGB (which stands for Red, Green, Blue) format.  You can choose from 48 basic colors, or click on a rainbow-like array and make a custom color.  Sometimes, thought, it takes me quite a few clicks to get something that's just right. I was in a hurry to move on to the next activity and decided that what I had was good enough.

Paint drawing area and color picker

As I was falling asleep last night I remembered a third color picking option, which is to directly input the red, green, and blue color values.  I started to wonder if there was an Internet resource that would give me the precise color code for what I was looking for. This morning a quick Google search told me it would. The first hit for my search was rgb.to, where it took me just a couple of seconds to find the exact information I was looking for.  I redid the slide and was ready for the weekend's shows.

Five years ago today: This and That