RGB
An additive color model that combines red, green, and blue light to reproduce colors. It is the foundation of color representation on displays, cameras, and web content.
RGB is an additive color model producing colors by combining varying intensities of red, green, and blue light. Maximum intensity yields white; zero yields black. This mirrors display hardware where each pixel contains RGB subpixels with independently controlled brightness.
In standard 8-bit RGB, each channel ranges from 0 to 255, yielding approximately 16.7 million possible colors. Professional workflows use 16-bit or 32-bit floating-point representations to preserve tonal smoothness across multiple adjustment passes.
- sRGB: The standard color space for the web and consumer monitors. It uses a nonlinear tone curve with an effective gamma of approximately 2.2. CSS colors like
#FF8800are interpreted as sRGB - Adobe RGB: Encompasses a wider gamut than sRGB, particularly in the cyan-green region. It is favored in print-oriented photography workflows
- Display P3: Adopted by Apple devices, covering roughly 25% more area than sRGB. CSS supports it via
color(display-p3 1 0.5 0)
RGB values are typically stored in gamma-encoded (nonlinear) form. Operations assuming linear light, such as alpha blending or physically-based shading, must first linearize the values. Modern GPUs handle sRGB-to-linear conversion in hardware when sampling textures, eliminating per-pixel computational overhead.