Colour


Martin McBride, 2021-04-25
Tags colour rgb transparency greyscale
Categories computer science colour

Modern computers make use of colour in various ways:

  • User interfaces use colour to provide visual hints to users, and to make the application more appealing.
  • Websites use colour for similar reasons, and also to make adverts and products for sale more attractive.
  • We use computers to take photographs, edit them, and print them.
  • Similarly we use computers to design or draw graphics and art.
  • We shoot, edit and watch videos and movies on computers.
  • Computer games would be pretty boring without colour.

In this series we will look at how computers represent colour:

  • Light and colour - a basic overview colour in the real world, and how the human eye sees colour.
  • RGB colour - colour is most commonly represented as red, green and blue values, which is described here.
  • Other colour spaces - other colour spaces such as CMYK and HSL are covered here.
  • Colour depth - how colour is represented in binary.
  • Transparency - coming soon.
  • Image compression - coming soon.
  • Image file formats - coming soon.
  • Colour management - coming soon.
If you found this article useful, you might be interested in the book Computer Graphics in Python or other books by the same author.

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