Real Tom Horn symbol art, taken apart down to the number. Zoom until the picture dissolves into a grid, kill channels, starve the bit depth, throw away resolution — and watch exactly what the machine keeps and what it loses.
Asset
Zoom & pan
Drag the image to pan, or scroll to zoom at the cursor. At 12× a grid appears — that grid is the image. At 34× every cell prints its own hex value.
Channels
Turn one channel on in “Isolate as grey” to see that plate on its own. With all three on you get true Rec.709 luma (0.2126R + 0.7152G + 0.0722B), not a flat average — green carries most of what your eye calls brightness. Turning A off in Composite makes every pixel opaque, which exposes the junk RGB most exporters leave under α = 0.
Bit depth (per channel)
Resolution
Slider is a power of two: 8 → 256 px, 3 → 8 px. Resolution is how many buckets you chop reality into. Downsampling here is an area (box) average over the source region — an honest downsample, not point-sampling.
Averaging space (gamma)
The 0–255 numbers in a PNG are not proportional to light — they are gamma-encoded (≈ value2.2 is the light). So 128 is about 22% as bright as 255, not 50%. Averaging the stored numbers directly therefore mixes light wrongly and darkens downscaled bright detail. Flip this toggle on the watermelon at 16 px and watch the highlights change. Full story in M2.
Backdrop (what's behind alpha)
Pixel under cursor
xy—hex—rgba—hsv—lab—bytes—
LAB is the perceptual space: L = how bright it looks, a = green↔red, b = blue↔yellow. Two colours with the same LAB look identical to a human even if their RGB differs.
Histogram (live, current settings)
Drop Bits to 3 and watch the cherry's highlight break into visible bands. Nothing was blurred and nothing was resized — you only removed how finely the machine is allowed to count. Banding is not a rendering bug; it is arithmetic running out of room. This is exactly why an 8-bit gradient background in a slot banner posterises after a heavy colour grade — and why you export masters at 16-bit.