"As for understanding hex color codes, any advice you can give me would be much appreciated. Maybe there is a way of setting the color in the PSD file at a different code so that when I export the jpegs, the color ends up being closer to what I originally intended?" Let's try and explain. And then you agree with me that the colours actually couldn't be closer, unless they were actually the same. Before getting into detail: expect JPEG to change colours. Sometimes by sheer good luck, the colours will stay the same on some of the pixels in an image, but there are no "colours that don't change", the change to colours depends on all of the nearby colours, and the compression settings, and other things. So, RGB colours are often given as three numbers between 0 and 255. (Sometimes they are given as numbers between 0.0 and 1.0... but this is just a simple scaling to fit). And sometimes they are given as hex codes. The hex codes are just a short way of giving three numbers between 0 and 255. There are three codes - taking an easy one 020406 - split it up - 02 04 06 - this is RGB 2,4,6. It's confusing because these aren't decimal numbers but hexadecimal, made using the letters a,b,c,d,e,f (or A,B,C,D,E,F) as well as the numbers. Don't know what hexadecimal is? No problem, here's a nice table (decimal in black followed by hexadecimal in blue): So let's take your original colour #f9f6f6. This is f9,f6,f6 - and from the table 249,246,246. Now a changed colour #faf6f5. This is fa,f6,f5 - from the table 250,246,245. So each colour has changed by only 1 at most. It could hardly be closer. Is it detectable? Yes? Does it matter - no, not for a typical photo of the real world. That's what JPEG is for. For graphics, text etc. the lossy stuff can indeed ruin it... A block of solid exact colour will likely become a blur of different colours; but the real world doesn't offer blocks of solid exact colour.
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