Color is a major part of most people lives. The perception of color can be broadly categorized into two types. One type is reflected color and one type is projected color.
Reflected color is the color we perceive when light strikes an object, such as ink on paper, and some wavelengths are absorbed while others are reflected back to our eyes. An example of this would be when you mix a blue ink and a yellow ink, the resulting color will appear purple. This is due to the blue ink absorbing wavelengths of light in the read and yellow spectrum while reflecting blue wavelengths. The red ink absorbs blue and green wavelengths and reflects red wavelengths. When you mix blue and red inks, the combined inks will absorb both blue and red leaving the remaining unabsorbed and reflected back in the violet to purple range.
Project color is how colors are created with light emitted from a source, such as a computer or phone screen. This is known as additive color mixing, where different colors of light are combined. Digital images can be represented color in many different formats. Two of the most common methods are 24-bit color and indexed color.
24-bit color uses the channels red, green and blue. Each channel is typically using 8 bits. This means each channel can represent 256 different intestity levels varying from 0 to 255, which allows for over 16 millions possible colors. An example of 24-bit is a JPEG image. Each pixel in the image has values for red, green and blue.
Indexed color takes a limited palette of 256 colors and each pixel in the image is repreented by an index that points to a color in the palette. This format is often used in GIFs. For example a GIF of a sunset could include various shades of orange, red, yellow, and blue to capture the sky, sun, and clouds. Each pixel in the GIF is assigned an index number that corresponds to a specific color in the palette.
– Index 0 might represent a deep blue.
– Index 1 could represent a bright orange.
– Index 2 could represent a soft yellow.
– Index 3 might be a light purple.
The gif animates by cycling through different frames to show the sun setting.
