Colour representation in Pillow

By Martin McBride, 2020-09-19
Tags: colour rgb transparency greyscale
Categories: pillow


Colour is a vital aspect of computer imaging, of course. Pillow supports various different raster image formats, which in turn support different ways of representing colour:

  • Light and colour - a basic overview of how the human eye detects colour.
  • RGB colour and other colour spaces
  • Colour depth - modern bitmap image formats typically use 8 bits per colour per pixel to represent colours, but Pillow also supports several alternatives, mainly used by older image formats.

Pillow refers to the combination of a colour space and a colour depth as the mode of the image. Pillow supports a fixed set of modes.

See also

If you found this article useful, you might be interested in the book NumPy Recipes or other books by the same author.

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