Color Mode
Aseprite supports three different kinds of color modes:
- RGB
- Indexed
- Grayscale
When you create a new sprite you have to choose one of these color modes. In this section you will see the details of each one.
RGB
RGB, or RGBA, stands for Red-Green-Blue-Alpha. Each image pixel contains these four components. It means that a pixel is completely independent from others.
The alpha component specifies how opaque the color is:
Alpha = 255 means completely opaque, and Alpha = 0 completely
transparent.
Special note: Background layer doesn't have an alpha component, so it will always be opaque.
Indexed
In this mode each pixel has a number that references a palette color. Your palette can contain up to 256 colors, and each pixel points to one of those colors (from 0 to 255).
Unlike RGBA, if you modify the palette color, all pixels that are referencing that color will change their appearance.
An important concept on Indexed images is that for transparent layers, we need a special index to act as the transparent color. Generally this index is 0, but you can change it from Sprite > Properties menu.
Grayscale
It's more like RGBA, just that you have two channels: Value and Alpha. Here 0 means black and 255 is white. The alpha channel behaves exactly like it does in RGBA mode.
SEE ALSO