[Tutor] quick PIL question

Max Noel maxnoel_fr at yahoo.fr
Fri Jun 3 00:49:05 CEST 2005


On Jun 2, 2005, at 23:39, Terry Carroll wrote:

>     The palette mode ("P") uses a colour palette to define the actual
>     colour for each pixel.
>
>
>
> Not sure what that means, exactly, but it looks like im.palette  
> will get
> the palette of a a P-mode image, and im.putpalette will change it.
>
> I'm not sure how to interpret the palette once you have it,  
> though.  The
> description of the ImagePalette class is not too helpful.

     Here's what this means. Computers nowadays use 24-bit display  
modes (8 bits for each of the components R, G and B -- 32-bit display  
is the same thing with an extra 8 bits of alpha/transparency). That  
is, 16.7 million different possible colors.
     GIF images, on the other hand, are 256-color (8-bit) images.  
However, these 256 colors are not fixed: they can be any of the  
regular 16.7 million.
     This is where the palette comes into play. Each 256-color image  
has a palette, which is basically an array of length 256, where each  
element is a (24-bit RGB) color. The color data for each pixel in the  
image is actually an index in this array.

     Makes sense?

-- Max
maxnoel_fr at yahoo dot fr -- ICQ #85274019
"Look at you hacker... A pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting  
and sweating as you run through my corridors... How can you challenge  
a perfect, immortal machine?"



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