How Does Color Work?
How does color work, Why isn’t seeing a picture of something the same as seeing it in real life? Well, there is actually an explanation for that. In the real world, color starts with light, which is made up of electromagnetic waves. When light hits an object, some of the wavelengths are absorbed and others are reflected. The color that we see is the visible wavelengths reflected from the object. In the real world, there is an unlimited number of different colors for you to see.
On a digital image, however, there is a limited number of colors. Even though the number of possible colors is larger than the number humans can perceive, it doesn’t provide the same fluidity when transitioning from one color to the next. Multiple different types of color systems are used for digital images, such as indexed color and 24-bit color. In indexed color, each pixel is given a value from 1 to 255, with each number representing a color. In 24-bit color, each pixel is assigned 24 bits to determine how much red, green, or blue is present. These bits are split into 8 bits for each color. With both of these systems, you lose the fluid transformation between two colors that you see in real life. So with indexed color, there are only 256 possible colors in a single photo, and in 24-bit color, there are over 16 million colors possible.