Coloring a page with MS Paint

[LuvAlphvle]

I downloaded some free coloring pages for my DD's upcoming birthday party.  I'm trying to color them in Paint and then enlarge them and use them as decorations.  The problem is that no matter what color I choose, it paints as gray on the page.  Can anybody help?

[Neil]

Perhaps try attaching one of these images so we can look at it?

[LuvAlphvle]

Okay, here's how it always turns out.  I used red for the hair and different shades of green for the tail and purple for the shell bra, yet everything is in shades of gray.  If I try a new blank page, though, the colors work just fine.

[patio]

Are you saying it "prints" in grey when you go to print it or is Paint showing it in grey ? ?

Are you saving your changes to the file ?

patio.   8-)

[LuvAlphvle]

Paint shows it in gray.  :-?  I've tried saving it as gif, jpg, bmp, and it always paints in gray.  I've even tried printing it out, scanning it back in, and then coloring it - but it's gray again.  :-?

[soybean]

I slopped this together with Paint.  As you can see, it's not gray:



Quite cumbersome.  I would not want to do this with Paint.  I think it's really not technically suited to what you're trying to do with such images.  The Fill feature yields a series of adjacent squares as with the hair in my image.  I used Brush for the other coloring.

[LuvAlphvle]

Somebody figured it out for me.

[soybean]

Can you share some info on the technique?

[LuvAlphvle]

Here's what she told me:

"What I did was open them in Photoshop, change them to RGB color, then save as a GIF/Web color.  It's not hard to do if you have Photoshop, but I don't know of any other way to do it."

[soybean]

So, is Photoshop or a similar sophisticated graphics software needed to do this or will Paint work?

[LuvAlphvle]

Once she changed them for me, I was able to color it just fine using Paint.  

[Rob Pomeroy]

The problem was that the image headers specified the file to be grey scale.  GIF images only support a maximum of 256 colours - either a range of colours, or up to 256 shades of grey.  Paint isn't really up to the job of converting between the various file types and colour depths, but there are lots of free programs that are.  Have a look in the software FAQ, under graphics, and you'll see plenty of goodies.    Follow the link in my signature.

[LuvAlphvle]

Awesome!  Thanks!  

[Rob Pomeroy]

No problem.  You'll probably spot lots of other excellent free software in there, while you're at it.