Color Depth Calculator
Enter a color depth in bits per pixel to see how many distinct colors it can represent — from 8-bit and 256 colors to 24-bit true color and beyond.
One bit doubles the palette
The number of representable colors is two raised to the bit depth, so every extra bit doubles how many distinct colors the format can store.
Format, not display
The result is how many colors the encoding can represent — what a screen actually shows depends on the panel and the graphics pipeline.
What is color depth?
Bits per pixel and the colors they hold
The color depth calculator turns a bit depth into the number of distinct colors that depth can represent. Color depth, also called bit depth, is the number of bits used to store the color of a single pixel: the more bits, the larger the palette. Because each bit is one binary choice, the count of representable colors is two raised to the bit depth — so 8 bits give 256 colors, 16 bits give 65,536, and 24 bits give the 16.7 million colors known as true color. It is the number behind image file sizes, gradient smoothness, and whether an image shows visible banding.
Enter a color depth in bits per pixel to get the number of distinct colors it can represent instantly.
The number of distinct colors is two raised to the power of the color depth in bits.
colors = 2 ^ bitsEach bit added to the depth doubles the palette, so the count grows exponentially: a one-bit increase from 23 to 24 bits jumps from about 8.4 million to 16.8 million colors. Enter a whole number of bits between 1 and 48 and the calculator returns the total number of distinct colors that depth can encode.
Suppose you are working with a 24-bit image, the true-color standard used by most photos and screenshots.
Take the color depth
24 bits per pixel — 8 bits each for the red, green, and blue channels.
Raise two to that power
2 ^ 24 — two multiplied by itself twenty-four times.
Read the result
2 ^ 24 = 16,777,216 distinct colors — the palette known as true color.
The result tells you how rich a palette a given depth offers, and the jumps between common depths are dramatic because the count doubles with every bit. An 8-bit depth represents only 256 colors — enough for simple graphics and old indexed-color formats, but prone to visible banding in photos. A 24-bit depth gives 16,777,216 colors, the true-color standard: more shades than the human eye can reliably distinguish, which is why 24-bit photos look smooth. Going further, 30-bit deep color represents 1,073,741,824 colors, ten bits per channel, used for HDR and professional photo and video work where even finer gradients matter. The pattern is consistent: each extra bit doubles the palette, so small increases in depth translate into very large increases in the number of representable colors.
The formula is exact, but it answers a specific question worth keeping in mind.
Representable colors, not what a display can show
This figure is the total number of colors the encoding can represent at a given depth — it is a property of the format, not of any particular screen. What a display actually shows depends on its panel, its own bit depth, and the graphics pipeline, so a monitor may render fewer simultaneous colors than the depth allows. The result also assumes every bit codes color directly and does not account for an alpha channel, which adds transparency rather than colors.