Introduction to color space

how many different colors can you see feels like an endless possibility impossible to count them all right well if we want to represent colors digitally we have to find a way of counting color that is for any given shade you can see we need to give it a unique number or an address because numbers are something both humans and machines can agree on one simple way we could do this is to give a percentage for each color value we call this an RGB triple for example 100 percent red plus 100 percent green plus 100 percent blue is white 0% red 0% green 0% blue is black whereas 100% red and 100% green but 0% blue is yellow we saw this in Lesson one mathematicians love to represent things geometrically or spatially so they came up with the idea of a color space it's quite simple normally we represent a point in three-dimensional space using XY and z coordinates like this but instead let's rename the axes red green and blue and that gives us this color tube the key idea is this every point within this cube represents a specific color a projector or a computer monitor could create so remember all these colors you were thinking about well any specific color you're looking at will always be a point in this cube to help this sink in we have a color cube exercise that you can play with give it a try