![color palette from image gipm color palette from image gipm](https://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/graphics_tools/gimp_advanced_guide/img355.gif)
Many variations on this scheme are in use. The most popular algorithm by far for color quantization, invented by Paul Heckbert in 1979, is the median cut algorithm. The three color channels are usually red, green, and blue, but another popular choice is the Lab color space, in which Euclidean distance is more consistent with perceptual difference. After the clusters are located, typically the points in each cluster are averaged to obtain the representative color that all colors in that cluster are mapped to. Almost any three-dimensional clustering algorithm can be applied to color quantization, and vice versa. Most standard techniques treat color quantization as a problem of clustering points in three-dimensional space, where the points represent colors found in the original image and the three axes represent the three color channels. Some of these are misleading, as the palettes generated by standard algorithms are not necessarily the best possible.
![color palette from image gipm color palette from image gipm](https://tinkerlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/color-palette-texture-mood-board.jpg)
![color palette from image gipm color palette from image gipm](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/a8/7c/89/a87c892200e29db2bc8534aeab6002b0.jpg)
The name "color quantization" is primarily used in computer graphics research literature in applications, terms such as optimized palette generation, optimal palette generation, or decreasing color depth are used. Color quantization is critical for displaying images with many colors on devices that can only display a limited number of colors, usually due to memory limitations, and enables efficient compression of certain types of images. Computer algorithms to perform color quantization on bitmaps have been studied since the 1970s. In computer graphics, color quantization or color image quantization is quantization applied to color spaces it is a process that reduces the number of distinct colors used in an image, usually with the intention that the new image should be as visually similar as possible to the original image. The same image reduced to a palette of 16 colors specifically chosen to best represent the image the selected palette is shown by the squares at the bottom of the image.