Nowadays, most graphics hardware runs in 24-bit or 32-bit truecolor, and this problem is largely a thing of the past. Each image may have its own palette, but the colors in each image will be remapped to a single palette, probably using some form of dithering. This can result in other images on the screen having wildly distorted colors due to differences in their palettes.įor this reason, on 8-bit graphics hardware, programs such as web browsers must address this issue when simultaneously displaying multiple images from different sources. If such an image is to be displayed on 8-bit graphics hardware, the graphics hardware's global palette will be overwritten with the local image palette. Most 8-bit image formats store a local image palette of 256 colors in addition to the raw image data. This second form is often called 8-bit truecolor, as it does not use a palette at all, and is thus more similar to the 15, 16 and 24 bit truecolor modes.īit 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00Data R R R G G G B B The other form is where the 8 bits directly describe red, green, and blue values, typically with 3 bits for red, 3 bits for green and 2 bits for blue. But in the original VGA card's 320x200 mode, 256 on-screen colors could be chosen from a palette of 262144 colors (18 bits: 6 red, 6 green, 6 blue). In most color maps, each color is usually chosen from a palette of 16,777,216 colors (24 bits: 8 red, 8 green, 8 blue).
![sheepshaver 8 bit color sheepshaver 8 bit color](https://newcastlebeach.org/images/8-bit-color-8.png)
The most common uses a separate palette of 256 colors, where each of the 256 entries in the palette map to given red, green, and blue values. There are two forms of 8-bit color graphics. The maximum number of colors that can be displayed at any one time is 256. 8-bit color graphics is a method of storing image information in a computer's memory or in an image file, such that each pixel is represented by one 8-bit byte.