Happy indexing!

There exist several color modes, some of which we come across more often than others known to professionals. RGB, CMYK, Indexed color are most common types of color modes, while Multichannel, Duotone, or lab modes are less frequent. The RGB color mode is an additive color mode in which red, green, and blue light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. CMYK refers to the four inks used in some color printing: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black). Depending on the color mode for a specific image format, ImageConverter Plus works with images of various color modes and allows changing between them. Not the rare ones like Duotone or multichannel, but RGB, CMYK, or Indexed color. We have talked about RGB and CMYK color modes before, while have never touched upon the topic of indexed color mode. Dealing with indexed color, an image with several colors is reduced to a limited color palette with specific colors you choose yourself. The quality of the resulting image though is not degraded – an 8-bit image will look almost like a 24-bit one. The technique determines the 256 most frequently used colors in the image and creates a color lookup table, also called a “color palette,” that is stored with the image. Rather than each pixel in the image having all three RGB colors (one 8-bit red, one 8-bit green and one 8-bit blue), each pixel contains one 8-bit number that indexes into the 256-color lookup table, which contains the RGB values. Indexed color is not really the best choice for photo realistic images – due to the lack of colors they may lose their realistic look. Otherwise ImageConverter Plus enables the users to save images in the image formats with the proper choice of color mode. Saving images as indexed color is possible with BMP, PNG, TGA, TIFF, MNG, PCX, and PDF image formats.