There are techniques to improve on these restrictions, but only go part of the way to solving the problems. Colour expert, Bob Stein of Visibone International Color Laboratories , has this to say about the limitations of the web-safe Palette. The web-safe palette is uniform numerically but it leaves a lot to be desired from the point of view behind human eyes. To me this reveals something about the viewer. Notice that more than half the palette could be called greens and blues.
Vast swaths have little distinction in human perception.
But blink and you'll miss the earth tones, coarsely glossed over in the leap from red to yellow. In a similar vein, the eye can discriminate some very subtle shades among the pale pastels, the colours of unripe fruit, the harvest moon and a young girl's blush. These are also given broad irreverent strokes in the web-safe palette. A contact sheet of photos I took along the Peace River in Florida suggested to me that our ancestral environment was painted almost exclusively in greens, blues and browns. I'm not sure I can explain why the greens aren't more finely classified by the eye-brain machinery.