Indexed color

For the astronomical color measure, see Color index. For the measure of minerals in rocks, see Color index (geology).

In computing, indexed color is a technique to manage digital images' colors in a limited fashion, in order to save computer storage, while speeding up display refresh and file transfers. It is a form of vector quantization compression.

When an image is encoded in this way, color information is not directly carried by the image pixel data, but is stored in a separate piece of data called a color lookup table (CLUT) or palette: an array of color specifications. Every element in the array represents a color, indexed by its position within the array. For color information, each image pixel then specifies only its index into the palette.

This technique is sometimes referred as pseudocolor or indirect color, as colors are addressed indirectly.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.