Pixels and Images
Knowing how pictures work behind the computer screen is very important to the way we understand pictures and images as a whole.
A pixel is the smallest controllable element of a digital image. You can often times see pixels if you have an image that is super “pixelated” if you zoom in too close. Pixels are each assigned their own color value using binary code, so they are represented as 0s and 1s.
Indexed images like the gifs shown above maintain a palette of colors, and each pixel in the image is assigned a color from this predefined palette. In the indexied images above, there are only two colors available instead of the typical 256. The index serves as a reference point for the actual color value and they are represented using binary digits.
Bit depth of an image explains how many colors it represents. This is basically “how many bits per pixel” the image can use. If you had a bit depth of 2 would allow for 4 colors to be used in the image. The image would lose quality, but it would be a smaller file size when downloaded.
The images shown above and below are indexed images that I changed the mode of. I made these indexed images with a bit depth of only 2, therefore the images became very pixelated and also only are able to use 8 colors.
