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All 16,777,216 RGB Colours In One Graphic

davidnaylor.org — "A while back, having nothing better to do, I set about creating an image with all the RGB colours. Yes, that's right. All 16.8 million."

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  • PicklePower, on 10/12/2007, -32/+96I was expecting to see some kind of scenery or something, not one of those blown-up HTML RRGGBB tables that I'm well used to (I know RRGGBB doesn't allow for more than 256 colors, but you get my point).
    • stanleyfresh, on 10/12/2007, -4/+68Uhhh.... isn't it 256x256x256 ????
    • rnstech, on 10/12/2007, -2/+65Uh, RRGGBB allows for 256 * 256 * 256 colors (16,777,216).
    • TomP, on 10/12/2007, -75/+8That guys pretty sad...
    • thefirstenemy, on 10/12/2007, -7/+38"Uh, RRGGBB allows for 256 * 256 * 256 colors (16,777,216)."

      It's just a whole lot easier to round and say 16.8 million.
    • pile0nades, on 10/12/2007, -12/+29256^3
    • borninda818, on 10/12/2007, -5/+31what do you get when you mix color number 16,777,111 with color number 16,777,112?
    • r2d7, on 10/12/2007, -58/+2If the entire image is 256 x 256 pixels. How do you get 16.8 million colours on 65,536 pixels?
    • drgruney, on 10/12/2007, -4/+14@PicklePower... I agree. I was expecting scenery or something. The pattern is strangely pretty though. New desktop!
    • packerbacker89, on 10/12/2007, -1/+28@r2d7
      Uhh... the picture is 4096 X 4096, which in my book adds up to 16,777,216 pixels.
    • dandiemer, on 10/12/2007, -19/+2http://www.duggmirror.com
    • MrPig, on 10/12/2007, -1/+23@r2d7
      You kinda need to click on the thumbnail to enlarge it.
    • igraham09, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14@borninda818

      you get color 16,777,111.5... duh
    • WaterDragon, on 10/12/2007, -18/+3Ahh ...the limitations of rational numbers!
      I guess the set of actual colors, in reality, is more complete It is a kind of continuum, only rendered as a 'discrete variable' when limited to rational numbers, such as in this digital representation.

      I guess the notion of 'individual' colors of the continuum is only defined and delimited by the perception of them, after all.

      In simpler terms, "actual reality" is analog, not digital!
      That is why computers will never be sentient.
    • gaoshan, on 10/12/2007, -18/+4I can do it in 1 single tiny speck. Wanna see it? OK,here we go:

      .

      See? Pretty cool, huh? All of the colors in 1.
    • shandar, on 10/12/2007, -4/+19@gaoshan: That is no colour at all, it's black. If you mix all colours you get white.
    • headswine, on 10/12/2007, -53/+2If it is indeed a png like he says, then it doesn't have all 16M colors... Compression would take care of that. :)
    • Muncher, on 10/12/2007, -1/+40@headswine

      PNG is lossless.
    • pauldonnelly, on 10/12/2007, -3/+20@Headswine
      Unless he used a format with lossless compression... like PNG.
    • grumbel, on 10/12/2007, -24/+5@WaterDragon in reality there are no colors, colors are a product of the human brain and have nothing to do with how light really works.
    • tempusrob, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8"what do you get when you mix color number 16,777,111 with color number 16,777,112?"

      Whatever your computer decides to round to. :) At least until we have floating-point imaging...
    • ElMoselYEE, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6@grumbel

      So I should bury this as inaccurate since this picture is really 16.8 million products of the human mind? Awesome, thanks for the heads up.
    • ivko, on 10/12/2007, -9/+3What the hell is this??
    • blueblood, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6its eye strain
    • InferiorWang, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2Am I the only one that had to convert that to 2^24?
    • BlackSheep720, on 10/12/2007, -15/+1LEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOYYYYYYYYYYYY
      JENNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNKINNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
      !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    • BlackSheep720, on 10/12/2007, -13/+1fyi, the leeroy outburst was because of my true enthusiasm for this amazing piece of work (/sarcasm)
    • gfixler, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7For a moment, I thought someone had posted something from my LiveJournal, from February 8th of this year. I did the same thing, making a graphic of every 24-bit color, though I looped differently than Mr. Naylor, and ended up with a different, more soul-hurting image. I also randomized it out of curiosity by running through every pixel in a loop, and swapping it with a randomly chosen pixel. It only took a few passes this way to make a really random image, and it did look middle-grey, just as Naylor's does.

      As for PicklePower's comment on wishing for scenery - that was actually why I did it - I was heading toward creating shared-luminance palettes, an old idea from '92 when I wanted to use Qbasic on my 386 to create palette sets for converting images to palettes that would all photocopy to the same values. I was a little too into photocopiers back then. They were like magic.

      I recently realized I'm finally smart enough to do these kinds of things, so I set to work in Processing (http://www.processing.org) making the image. I don't know how to create anything larger than the screen to save out in there (smarter, but still not that smart), so I did it in tiles, and joined them in Photoshop.

      Once in Photoshop, I took the electric image (which varies from Naylor's, and is even harder to look up, as I looped components differently), and converted it to greyscale. Then I had Processing scan the greyscale version to find all greys of the same value of my choosing, and used the color version as a lookup table to gather all colors of the same luminance, at least by Photoshop's opinion of how to convert things to greyscale - this is a highly subjective thing that probably varies widely between computers, imaging software, processors, color theorists' imaginations, and the strengths and weaknesses of individual people, and the roughly 10% of folks with color-based visual afflictions, but hey... you can't please everyone.

      Anyway, here's my random image, just now converted to png format:

      http://www.garyfixler.com/every24b.jpg (small, jpg preview)
      http://www.garyfixler.com/every24b.png (full size: 4096x4096)

      I won't upload the scrambled, as even png couldn't compress it below 48MB.

      The palettes I was able to make I based on 3 greyscale values: 63, 127, and 191 - roughly 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 of the way through the 0-255 range. For example, in the 63 variant, the colors are ALL of the colors of the 24-bit set that Photoshop converted to the same greyscale luminance value of 63.

      http://www.garyfixler.com/rgb063.png
      http://www.garyfixler.com/rgb127.png
      http://www.garyfixler.com/rgb191.png

      They're kinda hard to look at. Some friends have told me they vibrate. For me, they just have an unsettling look, like looking at a light that's too bright, or a face that's too ugly :)

      The next step is that I want to take the palettes and map images to them (or is it the other way around?), so that at the very least, if you can see all colors, you'll be able to make out the images just fine by the hues, but if you convert them in Photoshop (with the same color profiles and whatever else matters that I had in effect), you'll get a perfectly, singularly grey image. Also, it should photocopy to a mostly-the-same greyscale image. Finally, people with total color-blindness should see nothing at all but a grey rectangle, and it serves 'em right! Nah, just kidding, but it does suck that they won't be able to fully appreciate my genius ;)
  • ReadMeTXT, on 10/12/2007, -17/+68Sexy time
  • mb3581, on 10/12/2007, -14/+26Can't you just copy and paste one of the color pallates of any drawing program?
    • Xinareiaz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+43I dont think those show all of them, pixels arent small enough on the screen to show it in a small little thing like that
    • CircleFusion, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@mb3581

      Did you click on the thumbnail? The resulting image is huge. It's 4096 x 4096 pixels. The color palette in drawing programs give only a small representation of the full 16.8M colors. You can fine-tune the colors if you wish by entering number values, but most people can't recognize that many colors anyway.
  • rick2k, on 10/12/2007, -11/+7Hypnotic
    • Rhine23, on 10/12/2007, -3/+37Not so much if you have bad eyes o.O
    • Derrekito, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Indeed, anyone else get a little sick from looking at it? Maybe it's because I'm colored blind...
    • WaterDragon, on 10/12/2007, -7/+17"Maybe it's because I'm colored blind..."

      colored-blind??? There's a joke in there somewhere, but I don't want to say it.

      (something about how you have to 'sit in the back of the blind bus.' Not funny! Sorry!)

      I knew a guy who was 'colored-blind.' He could only see white people!
      (Sorry, again!)
      LMMFAO
    • seventoes, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6colored blind? So your invisible???
  • Shadar, on 10/12/2007, -27/+45If you add them all up you'll see he is missing 5 colors, shame.. he came so close.
    • Rhine23, on 10/12/2007, -40/+6No on likes a smart ass >.>. I forgive you...
    • Cymrubeats, on 10/12/2007, -2/+45I done a colour count in pspx and ps...both counted 16,777,216 colours. Nifty. It's amazing how looking at it my brain only acknowledges about 50 colours.
    • SenorFrog21, on 10/12/2007, -1/+19@cymrubeats

      That's so strange...but you are right, it looks like all of those squares are exactly the same. And it doesn't look like very many colors are represented there at all. It doesn't really look that impressive in that form.
    • Rayor, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7I ran it through GIMP's colorcube analysis. It said there are 16,777,216 unique colors.
  • cfuentea, on 10/12/2007, -28/+4jojojojo my laptop is dying!! :-(
  • lucid270, on 10/12/2007, -24/+58This is lame.
    • yevkasem, on 10/12/2007, -8/+15agreed. i'm waiting for the digg story unveiling "the quick brown whatsisface......"
    • EbowUK, on 10/12/2007, -10/+34It made the front page - it MUST be cool!

      Next on 60 Minutes - "When algorithms go wrong - the Digg story"
    • donutz, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2yevkasem: 'agreed. i'm waiting for the digg story unveiling "the quick brown whatsisface......"'

      Or better yet, "abcdefg..."
  • Celeron, on 10/12/2007, -14/+32Nothing to see. Move along.
  • ragnorok999, on 10/12/2007, -13/+4I agree it is lame... and it hurts my eyes..
  • venom8599, on 10/12/2007, -8/+38This might possibly be the most boring thing I've ever seen.
    • Cinder6, on 10/12/2007, -6/+3This is dumb, but the most boring thing ever was when Wii game cases made the front page. It was even worse than the PS3 game cases that are there now (at least THOSE have actual box arts, but even still, who cares?)
  • Zanwar000, on 10/12/2007, -6/+2giving me a headache :(
  • AhrenBa, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9Not as cool as I thought it would be......
  • oMeSSiaHo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6It was actually sorta neat to change the color depth to 16 bit. I guess it does make a difference because the image turned into little squares. Other then that, yeah I was a bit dissapointed.
  • marnaq, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6Cutting edge... truly cutting edge. Sooo many colors.
  • astrosmash, on 10/12/2007, -7/+10Here's what that image looks like if you set your display to 256-color:
    http://www.csc.uvic.ca/~dastone/256color.png

    More interesting than the original, I think.
    • yzerizef, on 10/12/2007, -3/+50Toronto is tied with Buffalo? Damn it!
    • aule, on 10/12/2007, -3/+72-1 now, Toronto just scored.
      On a more serious note, where is he watching the game... I'd love to watch the Canadiens game. Damn CBC isn't playing the Montreal games on french CBC this season.... bastards
    • Naga10, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Toronto is up 4-1 at the second intermission now.

      I hear you on the Canadiens dilemma. Any clue WHY they aren't showing them?

      And isn't it weird that I noticed the game (The Game) before I noticed the picture?
    • DelMonte, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Naga10

      Because the french sport cable network (RDS) got the contract for all Canadien games. I guess it's a way to get people to get cable... or something.
  • sprintmarathon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+21Go-go-gadget-gradient
  • yzerizef, on 10/12/2007, -2/+61Is it a sailboat? Damn it, I can't ever see these things!
  • rawM3TAL, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10It started flashing, and I had a seizure.

    You've been warned.
  • scratched, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5That picture really did slow my computer down a lot which is amazing considering a 1.6Ghz computer should have no problem with a picture. I'll digg it just for that.
    • codyfrisch, on 10/12/2007, -22/+4My dual 2.7 G5 didn't even start to blink at it, scrolled in safari like a charm.

      Not to say its all the Mac goodness, just with 2.5GB of RAM and a 256MB video card it helps.
    • miles32, on 10/12/2007, -15/+13.2ghz dualcores 2gigs of ram and a nifty 512nvidia graphics card!!
      Pretty good for a laptop if i do say so myself
    • TenebrousX, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15my e-penis is longer than yours, too!
      *roll eyes*
  • RobDeBob, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8Uh, guys... It's 4096 x 4096 pixels...

    Yes, it has all 16,777,216 colors. Do the math.
    • JesterRoyal, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5The argument wasn't the number of pixels. It was the number of unique colors. He could have repeated a color and thus be missing the final unique color.
    • Cymrubeats, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Well, you could have a 1/2/3/4/12,000 etc colour image that's 4096x4096 pixels, so that alone doesn't determine anything other than the resolution. If you convert it to monochrome, it'll still be 4096x4096 pixels. :P
    • kodek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4He just meant to reply to the guy at the top. Stop digging him down! :)
  • aximbigfan, on 10/12/2007, -16/+3lol, some peolle have been saying it really slows their system down, i noticed absulutly no differnce with my pentium d 805 box while defraging and with a bunch of differnt windows open....
    • Durrok, on 10/12/2007, -2/+28Congratulations, your PC can display a picture. Maybe we should write to tom's hardware to start using this in it's benchmarks.
    • yournamehere, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8and also you like to paint toy soldiers
  • tgunner, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5YES! My search for a new background has ended!
    • arkmtech, on 10/12/2007, -0/+26Hopefully you won't miss your retinas...
    • remy1701, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Making it your background uses up too much RAM.
  • JonnyTrombone, on 10/12/2007, -1/+18I'll never understand modern art.
  • baxtermadux, on 10/12/2007, -7/+13officially the worst thing thats ever made the front page
    • naylor83, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Thank you sir!

      BTW, am I the only one thinking that if captchas have to be as hard to read as those here on digg, bots will soon be overtaking humans in reading skill...?
  • devilwarriors, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1my good this guy must really have no life or was really really high
    • u8myfoood, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10umm... u can code a program that changes the rgb values for each pixel... i highly doubt that the dude or dudette did it pixel by pixel
    • naylor83, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Your are correct. The image was not made pixel by pixel.
    • SJZero, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0It would take almost no time to generate that image. Create a 4096x4096x32 bit surface(Easier to do than 24, same result), then just take x position and shift it over 12 bits and OR the y position. Depending on how the language is built, you can do it in about six lines of code if you're a sloppy coder.
    • naylor83, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Yes, anyone could have done it. But I did it.

      :D

      (That's not necessarily a positive thing.)
    • devilwarriors, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0i was talking about the point of doing this useless thing
  • mattmac24, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6scroll half way thru the pic so u can only see the top half of the pic.
    Then do the same thing so u can only see the bottom half of the pic.

    Just shows how what surrounds a colour can influence what we see that colour as

    top half looks was darker
    bottom half looks was lighter
  • joepinion, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Kinda cool actually how it's arranged... In each little square, the very left side has an R value of 0, while the right edge has an R value of 255. Meanwhile, in each little square, the very top edge has a B value of 0, while the very bottom edge has a B value of 255. Then each square (of which there are 256) are distinguished from each other only by the G value. The top left square has a G value of 0, while the bottom right square has a G value of 255. I like it.
    • henrah, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3LIke an idiot, I was wondering where all the gray pixels were. Then suddenly it hits me --- they're in the MIDDLE of EVERY SQUARE.

      I know, right?

      ...of course, by middle I mean somewhere on the diagonal that runs down the middle, equivalent to the larger square's own position within the whole image.
  • MrObjectional, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2So that's nice...I guess...
  • xrisnothing, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2Big ***** deal.
  • Jugalator, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17Pretty cool how PNG compress it to just 58 KB when all pixels are different. Its compression algorithm has to really like the kind of pattern this makes and how the colors rise in RGB values. In raw uncompressed form, this image should be similar (as image headers etc vary) to 4096*4096*(24/8) = 50,331,648 bytes.
    • Cymrubeats, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3That's something i was thinking myself. i'm not all that clued up on compression formats, but i immediately had to run a colour count on it the minute i downloaded it, as it was pretty hard to believe so much compression could leave it 100% intact.

      png really does need more support...there must be a massive amount of unnecessary bandwidth used evey day just because .jpg and .gif are still the dominant formats. I've also visited a few sites that still have their images in the bmp format...now that's wasteful.
    • wizgha, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Indeed, I'm always amazed at what quality (and low filesize) PNG compressions manage to achieve.
    • grumbel, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Not sure on the techical details, but PNG is optimized to handle color gradients very well and since image is pretty much just full of color gradients it ends up being pretty well compressed. With real world imagery it of course performs much worse, but still one of the best formats around when one needs a loss-less image format.
    • naylor83, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I'd say that PNG is great at finding horizontal and vertical patterns.

      Since this image is basically only one long pattern, it's not so strange really that PNG compresses it so effectively.
  • iOsiris, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2That hurts the eyes if you look at it too long, its amazing just look to the side then look at that png, and it seems like it strains the eyes a lot more.
  • sapo916, on 10/12/2007, -12/+1Not sexy enough for me.

    Digg me down/up/or not at all if you think Im sexy.
  • jeriqo, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3All the RGB colors?
    At what, 8 bits?
    Doesn't mean anything.
    • naylor83, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Well, I believe the RGB standard is defined as 3x8 bits of colour, not?
    • jeriqo, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13 yes, 8bits, not
    • LocalH, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yes it is. One pixel takes up 8 bits per component, and 3 components total (R, G, and B).
  • VarianX, on 10/12/2007, -6/+8If I had a 4096x4096 res monitor it'd make for a nice seizure-inducing background. Rumor is if you can see all 16.8million colors at once, you'll immediately solve the secret of life.

    The one redeeming factor: it showcases PNG format. Anything that brings attention to/promotes PNG is ok in my book.
  • ElectricGrandpa, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10I think the most impressive thing is that the png file is only 50k...
    • natterca, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3why? there's a lot of repetitive values in that image, eg. {0 0 0}{0 0 1}{0 0 2}...{0 0 255}{1 0 0}{1 0 1}..{1 0 255}.. etc.
  • helloworld45, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2wow that was really disappointing
  • kitkatsavvy, on 10/12/2007, -6/+2Boring! Next time someone puts every single colour into something, make it a nice portrait or a picture of trees or landscape or something... Couldn't you just copy and paste the colour selection thing from Photoshop when you pick a colour and just presented what he did? BORRRRRRRRRRRINg...
  • Vouksh, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2It BUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!! My retinas have been evaporated and my pupils have turned inside-out!
  • smohan123, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1I guess there's some technical or artistic merit behind it (artistic in that it incorporates the spectrum of art's foundation), however, it is really ***** lame from an aesthetic standpoint. And that's all that matters. Right?

  • Derrekito, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Seriously though, my brain hurts.
  • Breakdown05, on 10/12/2007, -13/+2hahaahaaa I hope he saved the original file because PDF does mess with the color even if it isn't noticeable to you. He should have saved it as PNG even if it would have been a bigger file size because the emphasis is on color ACCURACY.
    • wizgha, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8As a matter of fact, it *is* saved as PNG, and I cannot understand where you got the PDF from.
  • BenHanby, on 10/12/2007, -4/+0If you look at it really closely and tilt your head, you just might be able to make out that this is completely irrelevant.

    Swivel your head 30 degrees to your right and you'll hit reality -- infinite colors! [GASP]
    • Naga10, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0I seriously don't get this.

      Elaborate.
  • MrKlaatu, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3shhhhhh........i stole one of his pixels.
    i'm not tellin' which one.


    .................it's now my precioussssss!
    • NoodlyAppendage, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I'll take a wild guess and say 0, 145, 201.

      Warm or cold? I got all night.
  • saifatlast, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3I can't help but comment on how amazingly uninteresting that picture was. It's so uninteresting that I think I'll digg, just so others can also be amazed by its uninterestingness.
  • MrEcho, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1http://linkieme.com/color.html
    Color Range of #fff - #000
    A bit more useful for doing web pages.
  • crash128, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1It actually is a picture - one of those 3d things where you have to kind of focus behind it and cross your eyes a bit. Pretty nice scene, though.
  • Jonsey, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Now someone do one for CMYK!
    • NoodlyAppendage, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I'd like to see it too..

      RGB vs. CMYK.. FIGHT!
  • 8fans, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Since the cheaper 6 bit LCD panels only show 16.2 M dithered colors you need the usually higher priced 8 bit panels to show all 16.7 M colors. Now I'd like to see a side by side comparison of the two panels.
  • Gameflyer, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2@ stanleyfresh
    "Uhhh.... isn't it 256x256x256 ????"

    Amazingly, that equals 16,777,216
  • d722002, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1www.duggmirror.com
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