The color palette

Every painting program comes with a palette to choose colors from, and ours will be no exception by the time we reach the end of this section, real soon.

Conceptually, a palette is just a list of available colors, presented in a way that makes choosing the right color easy. In a full-fledged image editor, it usually includes every color available on the system (commonly a full 24-bit true color or the 16,777,216 unique colors). The customary representation of this all-encompassing palette typically looks like the following:

Illustration of a true color palette window

On the other hand, if we aren't going to compete with popular proprietary image editing applications, we might as well ship a limited selection of colors. For a person with little to no background in graphics, this may even pose a competitive advantage—choosing fitting colors that look good together is hard. For this exact reason, there are palettes on the Internet that may be universally used for...