In this video, I'm going show you 16,777,216 colours, and we're going to start with my favorite color grey. Now, I've got a code example ready to go here to show you this and the first thing I'm going to need to do is to explain the background command. So, the background command does two things; it clears the background of any images that are already on the canvas and it sets the background color. At the moment, the argument here is 255 and that will set the background color to white. If I want to set the background color to black, I can just change this to a zero. Now, if I want to get a grey, all I need to do is choose a value somewhere between 0 and 255. So, let's try something like 100 and that we can see quite a dark grey. So, if I want to make it a little bit lighter I could go for something like 150. Now, the question is why are we going between these values 0 and 255? Seems like some quite strange values. Well, this has to do with how computers store values in their memory. The way that computers do this is that they have lots of little switches in their memory which we call bits and bits can only have one of two values: a one or a zero. Bits are arranged into groups of eight switches called bytes and so in this image, all the switches are set so on and so all the values are one. So, the thing to think about here is how many possible combinations of values could we get out of eight switches? Well, we could have this combination, we could pick another random combination and we could keep going like this or we could have all the zeros as well. But how many combinations in total will we have? Well, it turns out that the answer is 2 to the power of 8 and that means 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 and when we do that sum, we get the value 256. That means the eight bits of information gives us 256 possible values. Now, in computing, we never start from number one we always start from the number zero, and that means that one byte of information allows us to have values starting at zero and going up to 255. So, this is why we use the values between 0 and 255. Now, we can go a little bit further than just working with different shades of greys, we can produce lots of different colors. So, we have a single argument at the moment in our background command, but actually we can have three arguments. So, I'm going to put in two extra values here. At the moment, we'll make them all 150 and we'll see we still have a grey. These arguments when we have three, stand for red, green, and blue. So, first of all, we could try just setting the green and the blue to zero, and putting the red all the way up to 255 and we'll find we've got a red background. So, then we could try obviously the green and we get a green background, and we can try the blue and we get a blue background. Now, the next thing we could try is actually getting different intensities of those colors. So, for example, I might want to make a much darker red, so I could go for something like a 150 on the red value and I'll get a nice rusty red color. I'll show you the same with the green. Here we have a much darker green. But we can go a little further, we can actually make secondary colors by mixing reds and greens and blues together. So, for example, if I mix 255 of red with 255 of Green, I actually get the color yellow. If I mix 255 of red with 255 of blue, I get the color purple or some people say magenta. Finally, if I mix 255 of green with 255 of blue, I get a turquoise color or some people say scion. Two hundred and fifty five of all of the colors gets us white, 255 just in red gets us red, 255 just in green, gets us green, and 255 just in blue produces blue. Two hundred and fifty five of red and blue together, gets us magenta, 255 of red and green together, gets us yellow, and 255 of green and blue together gets a scion. Zero of all the values gets us black. But we can actually go a bit further, we can start mixing our own colours by combining these shades. So, let me try and get the color orange. I know the orange is a bit like yellow, so I'm going to start with 255 and 255 and that gets me yellow. But now, what I'm going to do I think it's more towards the red, so I'm going to reduce the amounts of yellow and there we get an orange color or for example, I might try a pink. Well, I know that pink is very much like red but it's a little bit lighter. So, I wonder if I start increasing these two values evenly, will I get towards the pink that I want? There I have a pink. So, you can experiment with mixing your own colors in this way. So, we talked about how many colors we could get in total and how did I get to that big number that I said at the beginning? Let me show you. So, we can use exactly the same method that we used when we were talking about bits and bytes to work out how many possible combinations of colors we have. We have combinations like 255,0; 0,255 all of these different sorts of combinations. But how many are there in total? Well, we've got 256 possible values and then three sets of those and so we do the sum 256 to the power of 3. That is 256 times 256 times 256 and when we do that sum, we get the value 16,777,216 possible colors. So, you have all of those colors to play with. We call this RGB color space and there are other color spaces as well, such as HSV or CMYK. But we're not going to review these at this time. It's quite fun to develop your own colors for experimentation but it can be quite tricky finding the perfect shade that you want. So, there are lots of really good online tools that you can use and I picked one to show to you. You can find it at this web address rapidtables.com, and it's got lots of different ways of picking a color. So, you can move this pointer around to get the different shades here and you can see the RGB color values here, or you can pick a color directly from this chart or there's even a really long list of different shades that you can pick from to base your colors on. So, that's it for RGB colors, have a play yourself, experiment with the background command and creating your own colors.
