We’ve all noticed the vibrant colors that light up our screens, from the bright green of the Messages app on your iPhone to the classic Google colors that define their brand. But how does color work in the digital world, and what has been right in front of our eyes the whole time?
First, we need to define two types of color: reflected and projected color. Reflected color refers to the colors you see in real life, whether that be the color of the ink you print with, or the color of a banana sitting in front of you. When it comes to reflected color, it uses the CMYK model, which stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black as the primary colors. In reflected color situations, the object absorbs every color of light, except for the one you are seeing. For example, a banana absorbs most of the magenta and cyan colored light, which makes it appear yellow, as the yellow light is reflected back to you. Projected color is nearly the opposite and refers to the color of the light coming from, primarily, a screen. When it comes to projected color, the RGB model is used, which includes red, green, and blue in values of up to 255 each, to create a wide spectrum of over 16 million colors that can be represented digitally. In this case, the green color you are seeing in your ‘messages’ app icon is literally green light being projected from the screen.
First, we need to define two types of color: reflected and projected color. Reflected color refers to the colors you see in real life, whether that be the color of the ink you print with, or the color of a banana sitting in front of you. When it comes to reflected color, it uses the CMYK model, which stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black as the primary colors. In reflected color situations, the object absorbs every color of light, except for the one you are seeing. For example, a banana absorbs most of the magenta and cyan colored light, which makes it appear yellow, as the yellow light is reflected back to you. Projected color is nearly the opposite, and refers to the color of the light coming from, primarily, a screen. When it comes to projected color, the RGB model is used, which includes red, green, and blue in values of up to 255 each, to create a wide spectrum of over 16 million colors that can be represented digitally. In this case, the green color you are seeing in your ‘messages’ app icon is literally green light being projected from the screen.
And in the digital world, there are different ways to represent colors, too. When it comes to most images you see, especially those produced by digital cameras, you are looking at a large collection of pixels, which are the smallest possible element in a picture. On a typical computer screen, there are just over two million pixels, which shows you just how tiny each individual block of color is. Each pixel is assigned one color to fill the whole block.
When it comes to determining how to color each pixel in, we start to explore the ideas of 24-bit color and indexed color. Each pixel is given a unique color code, based on the number of digits that is included in the binary code being used. For example, if there is one bit of binary code being used, it means that the code can be represented as either a ‘1’ or a ‘0’, therefore meaning that there are two colors, one correlating with each option, that can create an image. As you can see in the image below, there are only two colors, which makes this a 1-bit photo.
When a photo uses a small number of bits to produce colors, it is considered indexed color. These photos have smaller storage sizes, as they only need to remember a small number of colors. But most modern technology uses way more than a bit or two, which is where this idea of 24-bit color comes in. In 24-bit color, the projected color model is used, so ‘red’ is given 8 bits to determine a specific shade, green is given eight, and so is blue. In an 8-bit image, you have up to 255 colors, or combinations of ones and zeros, which is how each value in the RGB scale produces a value up to 255.
But the magic of using 24-bit color? When you have 255 shades of red, green, and blue, you can produce up to 16,777,216 colors on a digital screen. That’s more than the human eye can see! And so now you know, the magic of digital color.