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Computers mix 3 colours in over 16 million combinations. A computer monitor is made up of tiny squares, called pixels, which together build up images. Computers mix colours to fill each pixel. The total number of combinations is greater than the number of colours the most people can see. Computers use a palette made up of 3 colours to fill pixels: red, green, and blue. Each of these has 256 shades. The total number of ways these shades can be combined is 256 x 256 x 256, which comes to 16,777,216. Biologists estimate that people can typically make out 10,000,000 different colours. It means neighbouring pixels can be filled with slightly different combinations that the human eye can't tell apart.
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No combination ever appears as a blank spot. Instead, the brain interprets similar combinations as the same shade.
