The Color Series #001 — RGB & The sRGB Colorspace

5 min readMar 15, 2022

Welcome to the The Color Series, where we write about stories, news, and educational pieces that revolve around the subject of sRGB colors, art, artists, NFTs, web3 technologies, coloration, and more.

What is RGB?

RGB (Red, Green, Blue ) color is best suited for on-screen applications, such as graphic design. Each color channel is expressed from 0 (least saturated) to 255 (most saturated).

What is sRGB?

sRGB is a standard RGB color space that HP and Microsoft created cooperatively in 1996 to use on monitors, printers, and the World Wide Web. It was subsequently standardized by the International Electrotechnical Commission. sRGB is the current defined standard colorspace for the web.

What is a Hex Code?

A hex color code is a 6-symbol code made of up to three 2-symbol elements. Each of the 2-symbol elements expresses a color value from 0 to 255. The code is written using a formula that turns each value into a unique 2-digit alphanumeric code. For example, the RGB code (224, 105, 16) is E06910 in hexadecimal code.

Are RGB colors and Hex Colors the Same? Whats the Difference?

There is no informational difference between RGB and HEX colors; they are simply different ways of communicating the same thing – a red, green, and blue color value. HEX, along with its sister RGB, is one of the color languages used in coding, such as CSS. HEX is a numeric character based reference of RGB numbers.

How Many RGB Colors are There?

Because each of the three colors (Red, Green, Blue) can have values from 0 to 255 (256 possible values), there are:

256 × 256 × 256 = 2563
= 16,777,216 possible color combinations

There are exactly 16,777,216 separate colors are visible! That makes for alot of choices when it comes to picking your “favorite color”

The besides the essential Red, Green, and Blue colors of the sRGB space, there are 6 other “main” or “pure” colors, these 6 colors and their hex codes are as followed:

Black ( #000000 )
White ( #FFFFFF )
Red ( #FF0000 )
Green ( #00FF00 )
Blue ( #0000FF )
Yellow ( #FFFF00 )
Cyan ( #00FFFF )
Magenta ( #FF00FF )

RGB Throughout History

The beginning of RGB color codes technically dates back to the mid-1800s, when red, green and blue filters were used to produce the first color photos. This idea arrived thanks to the Young–Helmholtz theory of trichromatic color vision, developed by Thomas Young and Hermann von Helmholtz.

By 1938, we had the world’s first color tv broadcast!

Fast-forward to 1981, when IBM introduced a limited color system for computing. And by 1987, we had the video graphics array (VGA) that allowed monitors to render RGB color.

Little more than a decade later, HTML 3.0 included 16 colors supported by the VGA palette. Around that time, the NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator became the first browsers to render RGB color.

The main purpose of the RGB color model is for the sensing, representation, and display of images in electronic systems, such as televisions and computers, though it has also been used in conventional photography. Before the electronic age, the RGB color model already had a solid theory behind it, based in human perception of colors.

Coloring the Modern World

The most common application of the RGB color model is the display of colors on a cathode ray tube (CRT), liquid-crystal display (LCD), plasma display, or organic light emitting diode (OLED) display such as a television, a computer’s monitor, or a large scale screen. Each pixel on the screen is built by driving three small and very close but still separated RGB light sources. At common viewing distance, the separate sources are indistinguishable, which tricks the eye to see a given solid color. All the pixels together arranged in the rectangular screen surface conforms the color image.

During digital image processing each pixel can be represented in the computer memory or interface hardware (for example, a graphics card) as binary values for the red, green, and blue color components. When properly managed, these values are converted into intensities or voltages via gamma correction to correct the inherent nonlinearity of some devices, such that the intended intensities are reproduced on the display.

The Future

From the first time RGB was used in photography in the 1800’s, to the modern day use of the sRGB in smart devices, the sRGB colorspace has literally changed the way we see colors in the digital world.

After 25 years of the existence of the sRGB colorspace, it’s time for sRGB to be more than just what was possible in the past. Coloration will be bringing a whole new dimension and branch of utilities to the sRGB colorspace through Blockchain Technologies, as well as changing the way we view NFTs overall. In our next article we will go going over Colorations’ Collection of 9,999 sRGB NFTs and their multiple utilities.