Base 10 number to 16 bit colour in C#

Question

I'm trying to represent each of the possible 65,536 colours of the 16 bit colour depth as a base 10 integer, but I'm having trouble.

Essentially I need to convert a base 10 number to a Color object representing that colour in the 16 bit spectrum. I think that base is important here, but I can't decide what base to go to.

Answer 1

The 16 bit color space uses 5 bits for the red channel, 6 for green and 5 for the blue channel. You can extract the values for each channel using bitwise operations.

int color = /* your 16 bit value here */

int red = color & 31;
int green = (color >> 5) & 63;
int blue = color >> 11;

To convert back, use

int color = red | green << 5 | blue << 11;