RGB Values Being Returned by PIL don't match RGB color

Question

I'm attempting to make a reasonably simple code that will be able to read the size of an image and return all the RGB values. I'm using PIL on Python 2.7, and my code goes like this:

import os, sys
from PIL import Image
img = Image.open('C:/image.png')
pixels = img.load()

print(pixels[0, 1])

now this code was actually gotten off of this site as a way to read a gif file. I'm trying to get the code to print out an RGB tuple (in this case (55, 55, 55)) but all it gives me is a small sequence of unrelated numbers, usually containing 34.

I have tried many other examples of code, whether from here or not, but it doesn't seem to work. Is it something wrong with the .png format? Do I need to further code in the rgb part? I'm happy for any help.

Answer 1

My guess is that your image file is using pre-multiplied alpha values. The 8 values you see are pretty close to 55*34/255 (where 34 is the alpha channel value).

PIL uses the mode "RGBa" (with a little a ) to indicate when it's using premultiplied alpha. You may be able to tell PIL to covert the to normal "RGBA" , where the pixels will have roughly the values you expect:

img = Image.open('C:/image.png').convert("RGBA")

Note that if your image isn't supposed to be partly transparent at all, you may have larger issues going on. We can't help you with that without knowing more about your image.