Bare-Colour Images

Everyone is familiar with black-and-white images and how they can be obtained from digital colour images by removing the colour information, leaving just the greyscale information.

Suppose, however, that we do the complementary operation and take a normal colour image and remove the greyscale information, leaving only the colour. Such bare-colour images can look rather weird and are of little interest in many cases, but in other cases they may be fun and even of some artistic interest. They can be useful in achieving special effects.

I have been playing with bare-colour images recently and wondered if anyone else has an interest in them?

Three examples of bare colour images, followed by the original images from which they were derived:

Two things that have an obvious effect on the bare-colour images:

1. Digital cameras usually have a much lower resolution for the colour data than for the greyscale data (because of the design of most sensors).
2. There is often a lot of colour noise in the darkest areas which may not be noticeable in the normal image, but it becomes very obvious in the bare-colour image.

I'll explain how to create bare-colour images in a later post.