Palette????

A palette is a means of reducing the amount of space needed to store images. You''ve used them before, I''m confident, as many images use them. That is to say, anything in an 8 bit color depth has a palette.

Basically, the palette is a list of colors in which the values for all three channels are defined. In an 8 bit palette, there are 256 of these colors. Once these are defined, the data in the image itself is simply a reference to the colors in the palette. By doing this, one can specify a color in only 8 bits, rather than 16 or 24, as it would be without the palette. That is to say, when reading in the image data, if you find the number 45, that means the color that goes there is whatever color is 45th in the palette.

If you still don''t get it, try tampering around with some paint programs in less than 16 bit color depths.

-Arek the Absolute