A simple question involving the color of a pixel?

I'm just wondering, I'm using a BufferedImage to load an image and retrieve the pixels by their location in an image. I looked through the APIs, but I can't seem to figure out how to find the shade of each pixel. I understand that each color has a range within the possibilities of the int returned in the method getRGB(). Does the range denote the shade? Or does the alpha value perhaps? I'm not sure. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

[452 byte] By [arlorna] at [2007-10-3 6:15:36]