The following are some things to consider regarding colors used in Windows operating systems:
- Palette changes for 16 or 256 bit color versus full
color:
The number of colors that can be displayed on the screen at the same time differ depending on the capabilities of the PC.
In a 16 color or 256 color environment, a palette containing a subset of colors is automatically created by selecting the most appropriate colors needed to display a particular image from a range of thousands of possible colors.
For full color (16,777,216 distinct colors), a palette is not created but rather the colors of the full color image can be displayed directly by assigning the color values directly to the pixels. Compared with 16 or 256 color, full color requires much more memory and the files are much larger, taking more time to process. - Displaying several images simultaneously:
For Windows users who simultaneously display different images with different palettes, the image that has focus is displayed with the appropriate colors but the image that does not have focus must be displayed with the color palette of the other image. If, for example, a image of a green forest is displayed with an image of a blue sea, the image that does not have focus will look quite different from the true image. This problem does not exist in a full color environment. - Fixed palette:
One way to display several full color images at the same time is to decrease full color into a fixed palette for 16 or 256 color environments. The above problem does not exist since all the images are displayed using the same fixed palette.
- Displaying full color images in a 16 or 256 color
environment:
To display full color images in a 16 or 256 color environment, Windows automatically creates the color palette as noted above. Depending on the possible colors, the displayed image and the full color image can look quite different. There is no problem displaying 16 or 256 color images in a full color environment.