CHAPTER 11 HOW THE DIGITAL DARKROOM MAKES GOOD PHOTOS INTO GREAT FANTASIES^173
Each pixel in a digital photo-
graph is made up of three dots
of color: red, blue, and green.
Each of the colors is assigned a
number from 0 to 255 that
describes how light or dark the
color is. So, instead of painting
the rose one shade of blue, the
digital darkroom calculates the
values of gray represented by
the pixels and uses shades of
blue that correspond to the dif-
ferent values of gray. This gives
us a range of blue, like this.3
The reason the yellow roses come out to be a lighter shade of blue than the red
roses is that the gray values of the pixels in the yellow roses are lighter than those
of the red pixels.4