RGB color space is composed of a set of colors made by combining various amounts of red, green, and blue. Devices like phones, tablets, TVs, and computer monitors all use RGB color space to display text and images. Typically, each pixel on a screen can display 256 shades of each of those three primary colors, making for a total of 16,777,216 possible colors, which is probably more than your eyes can even distinguish (especially before your first cup of coffee).
If you’re curious about what an image containing all 16,777,216 colors might look like, head over to AllRGB.com. The site offers a collection of almost 100 images in which every single RGB color is represented exactly once. The subject matter runs the gamut (pardon the pun) from Moiré patterns to Mona Lisas to mustard jars. They’re all pretty psychedelic—and humungous; loading the full size images is an exercise in patience.
I doubt if any of these images will be displayed in a museum of modern art. But if you’re like me, you might get an odd sense of accomplishment by viewing them. If someone asks you what you did today, you can tell them, “I saw all the colors.”
Or if you’d prefer a hard copy of the RGB spectrum instead, you could always check out the incredible RGB Colorspace Atlas.
This article was last modified on July 7, 2023
This article was first published on September 17, 2013
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Hi Bret- Point taken. The site doesn’t specify any flavor of RGB, and I downloaded one of them to see what I could find out but it was untagged. I think the scripts that make these images just do the math of making sure every value is represented once. How you interpret those values is another question.
This is fairly misleading. Specifically, which RGB color space are we referring to here? There is no one RGB color space. I think it’s important for all of us creative types to understand what all this color stuff really means and that starts with site such as this puting out accurate information that we can relate to. Thanks!