You are seeing the difference between RGB ("Truecolor") images, which are rows x columns x 3, compared to a Pseudocolor images, which are rows x columns plus a something-by-3 colormap:
[canimg, canmap] = imread('canoe.tif');
size(canmap)
ans =
256 3
In order to get a pseudocolor image displayed in color, you need to activate its colormap:
This is done on your behalf if you ask to imshow('canoe.tif')
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