Before you begin working on the color aspects of your photo, be sure that your computer's video card and monitor are set up to properly display them. With most systems, you can choose to display 8-bit color (256 colors), 16-bit color (32,000 colors), or 24-bit color (approximately 16.7 million colors). You may see the latter two settings referred to as high color and true color, respectively.

Obviously, for the best results, you need to see all the colors in your image, with means that you need 24-bit color. Check your computer manual to find out how to check and change your monitor settings — the process varies depending on your operating system, monitor, and video card.

Note that the more colors you ask the system to display, the more you tax the computer's resources. If you experience problems, you may need to upgrade your video card, system memory (RAM), or both. Also try setting the monitor display to a lower screen resolution — for example, if you're using a screen resolution of 1280 x 1024, lower it to 800 x 600.