Why divide the colors by 255

In C3_W1_KMeans_Assignment

# Divide by 255 so that all values are in the range 0 - 1
original_img = original_img / 255

But there is no need to do so - when I commented it out it worked fine. I understand in other ML contexts reducing the values to the range 0 - 1 is important but not here. Right?

Hello @toontalk!

There is no need to for this assignment because all color channels share the same scale. Indeed, the way we read a PNG there will already give us the range of 0 and 1.

We only need to make sure it is in the right range (0 - 1) when showing the images using ax.imshow in the last cell.

Raymond