CompuServe Messages

The mistake is in corelating RGB directly. Yes, in RGB, if all you try to use is the red component, you only have 256 possibilities. The YUV color space isn't divided like that. The chrominance is coupled with luminance as an "added feature". I guess this is the closest representation of analog data using limited digital space. When I think of 2^24 possibilities, I'm not dividing the spectrum in 3 distinct groups of R(2^8), G(2^8), or B(2^8). I'm just raising the dynamic range of luminance and chroma. Your art instructor would be right if the 65k colors were linear and not divided into 5 bits each of R, G, and B. Don't think digital, think analog. I wrote a program that shows this quite well. Even if you don't ever need it, it's interesting just to look at the representation of a different color space. It's a chroma key program where I try to get out of RGB and make you think exclusively in LHS (Luminance, Hue, and Saturation). Even though I'm dealing with a 48 bits RGB color space, I use only 8 to do the display. What I do to get a final "alpha" is to allow you to double mask. This is a trick to allow 16 bits alpha using only 8.