How can you transform a color x3uint8 image to uint8?

 I have following color image 1152x2048x3 uint8. Is there any way to transform it to 1152x2048 uint8 while still keeping the colors ?

Answer 1

[Thorsten]

No, because for each pixel 2^(8+8+8) different colors are possible.

Answer 2

[Guillaume]

Of course, not! Colour in matlab is defined as a triplet of red, green and blue intensity. Thus, for each pixel you need to store 3 values.

You could store the colour image as a 1152x2048 uint32 where each pixel is red * 2^16 + green * 2^8 + blue, but that would actually use 4/3 more memory and you wouldn't be able to use matlab standard image processing functions, so there's little point.

Why do you want to do that anyway?