How Many Colours Can You Create in a Computer?

Do you know, you can create 16,777,216 colors (or shades) on your computer screen?  

Shocked? But it’s true. Let’s see how!

All the colors on a computer screen are created using three basic colors – Red, Green, and Blue, commonly referred to as “RGB”.

The number of colors supported by RGB depends on how many possible values can be used for red, green, and blue. This is known as “color depth” and is measured in bits. The most common color depth is 24-bit color, known as true color. It supports 8 bits for each of the three colors, or 24 bits total. This provides 28, or 256 possible values for red, green, or blue. 256 ✖ 256 ✖ 256 = 16,777,216 possible colours in the “true colour” pallet. 

These many colors are more than enough for any requirement as the human eye can only distinguish about 7,000,000 colors.

All three colors viz., Red, Green, and Blue can take any of the 256 values (0 to 255) to create a unique shade. Combining red, blue, and green light is the standard method of producing color images on screens, such as TVs, computer monitors, and smartphone screens.

When 100% of each color is mixed together, it creates white light (255, 255, 255) and when 0% of each color is combined, no light is generated, creating black (0, 0, 0). And when each color is taken in equal proportion, grey light is generated, (50, 50, 50) or (121, 121, 121) both will generate grey color.

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