RGB Planes

Herewith three sets of 256 planes, each 256-by-256, representing slices of the 24-bit RGB color space along the red, blue, and green axes. There is a reason for doing this.

What happened was, I was trying to pick a color for a schematic on a slide, and I was dissatisfied with all three color-pickers in the software I was using. Because I’ve been doing this for so long, and because I’ve never worked in print, I just think of colors as RGB triples and that’s all there is to it.

So instead of all this color-wheel and CMYK and slider stuff, I imagined all the possible RGB combinations in a big cube, 256x256x256, and started wondering how you might be able to explore it. The answer has some 3D components, obviously, but in the interim you should be able to slide along each of the three axes, and see a plane showing all the 256x256 possible colors for a particular value of red, green, or blue.

The notion of the RGB cube is hardly new, in particular see the nice Processing demo. But nothing out there took a serious whack at dealing literally with the 256x256x256 reality.

It took 93 lines of Java to generate the planes (and only a couple of minutes of processing time on a modest Unix box, I’m impressed) to generate 768 PNGs occupying 110M. Maybe I’ll never do anything with them. Some of them are kind of pretty. Here they are:

The Perl to generate the table was half as big as the Java to generate the planes.