Colors & Palettes

What Is a True Color Image ?

A True Color image is a type of image that mixes shades of red, green, and blue to provide over 16 million colors. These color images are also known as RGB24 images.

What Is a Palettized Image ?

A palette is a look-up table that is used to translate an index value into a color value (known as an RGB value).
Color images are often stored using a palette so that they take up less space. Such an image is said to be palettized. A complex image that has been palettized is often of lower quality than the original image. This is due to the fact that the eye can distinguish many more colors than are usually available in the palette.

Pixels

The pixel is the smallest graphic unit on a screen or image. It is equal to one screen dot.

Color Depth

A true color image stores the image info in units of 24 bit per pixel ( 8 for Red, 8 for green, 8 for blue).

A 256 color palettized image stores the image info in:

• a section of 256 color info, named palette
• units of 8 bit per pixel (index value of the palette).

A 16 color palettized image stores the image info in:

• a section of 16 color info, named palette
• units of 4 bit per pixel (index value of the palette).

A 2 color palettized image stores the image info in:

• a section of 2 color info, named palette
• units of 1 bit per pixel (index value of the palette).

The Color Depth of an image is the number of bits per pixel used to display and store an image

Changing the ColorDepth property, changes the color depth of de image.

ColorDepth Constants.

Properties and methods.

Some properties and methods change the structure of the original palette, if you are working in palettized mode:

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