Should you normalize RGB values by 255 or 256?
Summary
The article compares two RGB normalization approaches for 8-bit images: the standard divide-by-255 method and an alternative divide-by-256 method with a 0.5 bias. It explains how each scheme maps integers to the [0,1] range, analyzes the bin widths at the extremes, discusses reconstruction error, and argues that the 255 approach is safer when processing images from others, while 256 can offer slight precision when you control both saving and loading.