For you and me, RGB color spaces may just be an obscure but important mechanism towards achieving properly color-balanced photos. For a certain group of image nerds, however, it’s the whole enchilada.

Welcome to the allRGB Project, an ongoing effort that challenges digital artists/programmers to create images that use each of the approximately 16 million colors that comprise the RGB spectrum.

Before we get to the photos, a little bit of science is in order. If you’d like to skip the science, we promise not to judge you… just gloss on over the following paragraph.

The RGB color model posits that all colors are mixtures of three primary hues — red, green and blue — which can be combined in various proportions to produce 16,777,216 distinct colors discernible to the human eye. Various specifications based on the RGB model allow consistency among display screens and digital images.

The rules are pretty simple: Use whatever algorithms or tools you like to create an image of 16.78 million pixels, one for each color in the RGB spectrum. Each color may be used once and only once.

So far, the project has collected 99 entries from 36 artists, ranging from geometric abstractions to recognizable images with striking coloration. GitHub has a free tool for automatically generating such images, or you can do your own math.

(via Pop Photo)

Bonus weenie tip: Load one of these images into Photoshop and check out the histogram.

Image credits: Space Shuttle by Benny, Barcelona by Eric Burrnett, High Quality Render of Wedding Photos by 1COmMJz2, Naamloos-1 by sjoerd, Flowers by brandf, Reddit by brandf, M.I by ACJ and Chilly Run by Death9. All provided by allRGB