The image in the previous exercise used the classic RGB color representation to represent color. That’s 24 bits to represent each color. However, the image only had 4 different colors in it! 24 bits is nice when we need to represent millions of different colors, but in this scenario we only needed to represent 4 colors!

If an image has only 4 colors, how many bits are necessary to represent one pixel’s color?

Describe a new custom encoding that uses fewer bits to represent each color in the image. What is your encoding for each color?

If you were to re-encode this image using your new encoding, how many bits would you save when compared to the 24 bit RGB encoding? As a reminder, here is the image:

It is 17 pixels wide, 20 pixels tall, and has 4 different colors: red, blue, black, and white.

If you were to decompress your image would you lose any quality or would you be able to get back to the original image?