Truecolor

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Truecolor

See also True Colors (disambiguation).

Truecolor is a method of representing and storing graphical image information (especially in computer processing) in an RGB color space

RGB color space

An RGB color space is any additive color space based on the RGB color model. A particular RGB color space is defined by the three chromaticity of the red, green, and blue additive primaries, and can produce any chromaticity that is the triangle defined by those primary colors....
such that a very large number of colors, shades, and hues can be displayed in an image, such as in high quality photographic images or complex graphics. Usually, truecolor is defined to mean at least 256 shades of red, green, and blue, for a total of at least 16,777,216 color variations.

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Encyclopedia

See also True Colors (disambiguation).

Truecolor is a method of representing and storing graphical image information (especially in computer processing) in an RGB color space

RGB color space

CLUT

A colour look-up table is a mechanism used to transform a range of input colors into another range of colors. It can be a hardware device built into an imaging system or a software function built into an application....
).

Truecolor is 16,777,216 colors

For each pixel

Pixel

In digital imaging, a pixel is the smallest item of information in an image. Pixels are normally arranged in a 2-dimensional grid, and are often represented using dots, squares, or rectangles....
, generally one byte is used for each channel while the fourth byte (if present) is being used either as an alpha channel data or simply ignored. Byte order is usually either RGB or BGR. However, systems do exist with more than 8 bits per channel, and these are often also referred to as truecolor (for example a 48-bit truecolor scanner).

One byte (eight bits) per channel permits 256 (2⁸) intensities for each of the color channels. This allows 16,777,216 (2²⁴) colors for each pixel (often approximated as 16 million, because 2²⁰ is close to 10⁶; although the true number is closer to 17 million). The human eye is popularly believed to be capable of discriminating among as many as ten million colors.

Thirty-two bit truecolor can hold an alpha channel, which given the pixel's degree of transparency (versus opacity) for representing translucent images (and is often a requirement for hardware acceleration of such drawing) allowing desktop environments to more easily provide effects such as translucent windows, fading menus, and shadows.

In a framebuffer

Framebuffer

A framebuffer is a video output device that drives a video display from a memory buffer containing a complete video frame of data. The information in the buffer typically consists of color values for every pixel on the screen....
, an alpha channel is meaningless, but 32-bit truecolor is often used because it makes pixel addressing easier. Addressing an array of 24-bit pixels requires multiplication by three, which is more computationally expensive than multiplication by four, which can be computed by bit shifting.

Truecolor is the color

While the above explanation is more or less from a Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is a multinational corporation computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of computer software products for computing devices....
point-of-view (as Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of software operating systems and graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Microsoft first introduced an operating environment named Windows in November 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces ....
is the most common desktop operating system

Operating system

An operating system is an interface between hardware and applications; it is responsible for the management and coordination of activities and the sharing of the limited resources of the computer....
and it refers to the 24-bit per pixel color mode as truecolor), truecolor can also refer to a display mode that does not need a color look-up table (CLUT). Thus, truecolor can be used with any color depth (e.g. 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit...) but only without a CLUT. However, RGB encodings with only five or six bits per color channel are typically called "Highcolor" or "thousands of colors", while color depths of eight bits or less usually do employ a CLUT.