Deep Color
   
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    Graphics Glossary

         
    GraphicsAcademy.com  >  Glossary  >  Deep Color

       

     

    Deep Color

    Deep Color describes bitmaps where the color of each pixel is defined by three separate Red, Green and Blue values (see RGB), each specified using 10 bits or more.

    Note: Some recent Microsoft documentation uses "High Color" to refer to what we (and most others) call Deep Color.

    The most commonly used Deep Color, color depths are:
    • 30 bit Deep Color, where each of Red, Green and Blue is allocated 10 bits (range 0 to 1,023) per pixel, thus allowing up to 1,073,741,824 colors.

    • 36 bit Deep Color, where each of Red, Green and Blue is allocated 12 bits (range 0 to 4,095) thus allowing up to 68,719,476,736 colors.

    • 48 bit Deep Color, where each of Red, Green and Blue is allocated 16 bits (range 0 to 65,535) thus allowing up to 281,474,976,710,656 colors.


    The main alternatives to storing color images in Deep Color are True Color (where 24 bits are used for each pixel's color information), High Color (where 16 bits are used for each pixel's color information), or the use of a lower color depth in combination with a palette specifying a more limited choice of possible colors to use in the image. When a palette is used, the information stored for each pixel is simply an index into the the palette, selecting one of the colors from the selection available.
    • The main advantage of using Deep Color (and True Color or High Color) is that it allows images to contain many different colors simultaneously. In general, the more bits of color information per pixel, the greater variety of colors and amount of color detail can appear in an image. The disadvantage of having more bits of color information per pixel is however that it increases the amount of memory and file storage required, and it is more processor intensive to manipulate images with more color information.

    • The main advantage of using a palette is that it saves on memory and file storage, and allows faster processing of images. The disadvantage is of course that images with palettes can only contain a limited number of different colors (the number of colors being determined by the size of the palette).

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