Reflected color is the color we see when light hits an object, like ink on paper, and reflects back to our eyes. An example of reflected color and how it is perceived is wall paint. When deciding to paint a wall it is advised that a person does a test swatch on the wall to determine what the color will look like in the light of the room whether natural light or electric lights such as an overhead light or lamp because the paint can look different on the wall than it did in the store. Projected color is created by emitting light directly from a source, such as a screen, where colors are made by mixing red, green, and blue light. An example of projected light is how separate images can differ when looked at on two separate devices. I experienced this when I was shopping for a camping chair online. When looking at the chair on my laptop the chair looked brown and when I looked at the chair on my laptop the chair was blue. The devices displayed different colors for the green chair. The key difference is that reflected color comes from light bouncing off an object, while projected color is emitted from a digital display.
Digital images are made up of several pixels and each pixel has its own color. If the image is in indexed color format it has 8-bits but if the image is in 24-bit color format each pixel has 24 bits. Indexed color is only used for GIF formatted images and uses a limited palette of 256 colors where each pixel references a color in the palette. 24-bit color uses 8 bits each for red, green, and blue, per pixel allowing 16,777,216 color possibilities, offering richer and more detailed colors, as seen in formats like JPEG and PNG. Indexed color images don’t contain as much detail as 24-bit color images however they take up less space in terms of digital storage.