All 16,777,216 RGB colours (2005)

If I hadn&#x27;t been told what this is, I would never have guessed that it&#x27;s a representation of all colors. I know it&#x27;s all the colors -- I can zoom in and see lots of different colors -- but why doesn&#x27;t it <i>look</i> like that? My initial description would have been &quot;purple and green squares&quot;. I might elaborate that it&#x27;s &quot;purple and green squares with a bit of blue separating the rows&quot;. But why doesn&#x27;t it feel like all colors? Because of the way it&#x27;s organized? For the same reason that his randomized pixels looks like a grey blob?

Evil UX idea of the day:<p>Color selector where you pick the color from the randomized image with an eyedropper tool.<p>The colors are all in there, what&#x27;s there to complain about?

See also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;allrgb.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;allrgb.com&#x2F;</a>.

I crafted a PNG image that squeezes all 16777216 colors into just 49131 bytes. This comes very close to the 1032:1 maximum compression ratio that DEFLATE compression can achieve on any data.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codegolf.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;217544&#x2F;39242" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codegolf.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;217544&#x2F;39242</a>

A long time ago, I made a version of this by taking a 3D Hilbert Curve, coloring the line with a 24 bit RGB color cube, and repacking the line as a 2D Hilbert Curve: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;niftythings.paulnickerson.net&#x2F;2011&#x2F;03&#x2F;hilbert-rgb-palette.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;niftythings.paulnickerson.net&#x2F;2011&#x2F;03&#x2F;hilbert-rgb-pal...</a>

A few years ago I wrote some software to create allrgb images that resemble a source image. I even wrote a small blog post about it<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;davidbuckley.ca&#x2F;post&#x2F;colour-sort&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;davidbuckley.ca&#x2F;post&#x2F;colour-sort&#x2F;</a>

I was with my cousin in law at the Getty a few years ago and we were talking about how much information is lost when you look at a screen. The world is a lot richer than a mere 16,777,216 colors. I think there are things about our sensation of colors that don&#x27;t have names yet -- there are just things that greens and browns do that I have not been able to find words to describe. There are interactions light has with materials that we have not separated out into &quot;colors&quot; or &quot;textures&quot; yet.

&gt; Edit 2011-06-30: Was inspired by one of the comments to try and compress the 58 kB png file. IzArc can create a 7z file which is only 705 bytes large! That is 1&#x2F;71436th the size of the uncompressed image in Tiff format. That’s pretty impressive stuff!<p>This is hard to believe. An already compressed PNG can be substantially re-compressed by a generic lossless process?

&gt; And how about a little mathematical challenge: What are the chances that, by randomizing the pixels in the (randomized) image above, I would get the (ordered) version at the top?<p>If I&#x27;m not mistaken, this would be `(2^24) permutation (2^24)`, aka `(2^24)!`, an unbelievably large number!

I wonder if dithering techniques could be used to convert <i>any</i> image into a 16 million colour image?<p>Edit: Yes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;allrgb.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;allrgb.com</a> (should have googled)

I assume it&#x27;s because the image follows very specific patterns that the PNG algorithm is able to compress it so much? Each individual square has a set green value, the pixel to the right is red + 1, and the pixel below is blue + 1.<p>I was trying to figure out how it&#x27;s possible to store 16 million separate colors in 58,000 bytes. Looks like it&#x27;s storing information about the gradient patterns, and not each individual color.

Why is it that the image with the scrambled pixels <i>looks</i> mostly grey, even though it contains all the colors, just scrambled? Even the effect is amplified when the image is zoomed out

Needs (2005) in the title.

A fun programming challenge: take a source image, and then recreate the image using the entire RGB color space, one different RGB value per pixel.

And you can name them all here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;colornames.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;colornames.org&#x2F;</a>

Excellent demonstration of PNG progressive decoding by the randomized image (when opened full-res in-browser).

When I clicked the randomized image, why did it go through waves of rendering?

Doesn&#x27;t really have all with the compression though.

All?