Color Palettes

Color Palettes Used for GIF Graphics Files

A color Palette is a simple collections of solid colors.

For GIF images, a Color Palette can have up to 256 predefined or Indexed Colors.  Although, using a Palette with a fewer number of colors will give you a smaller file size when you save your image because fewer colors have to be defined for the Palette and for the file.

If you are able to define a Color Palette when you save your image and want to decrease the file size as much as possible but want to retain as good a color rendition as you can, then save it using an Optimized Color Palette or Adaptive Color Palette instead of a Standard or System Palette.

A Standard or System Color Palette by default, will use a predefined range of Red, Blue and Green colors.  An Optimized or Adaptive Palette is a customized color palette and a little more complex. 

Rather than storing the number for each color of each pixel in a file, it figures the recipe for the colors that exist in the image and then assigns a number to each of these colors.  Then it stores only the assigned number of each pixel, rather than the more lengthy color number for each pixel.  Thus, you get a truer color of the image because it preserves the color spectrum of the image and the file size is smaller than if you had used a Standard Palette.

With an Optimized or Adaptive Palette, the fewer colors you have in your original image, the more accurate will be the colors when they are displayed, that are saved in the file.

The table below lists some of the different types of Indexed Color Palettes that are used with GIF images:

In the next section on Color Models, I'll explain the difference between the HSB, RGB and CMYK color models.