24-bit Colour Images

An example 24-bit colour image is illustrated in Fig. 6.14 where:

Example of 24-Bit Colour Image

• Each pixel is represented by three bytes (e.g., RGB)

• Supports 256 x 256 x 256 possible combined colours (16,777,216)

• A 640 x 480 24-bit colour image would require 921.6 KB of storage

• Most 24-bit images are 32-bit images, the extra byte of data for each pixel is used to store an alpha value representing special effect information