Read 8 bit - colour as 24 bit colour

Hello I know it might be stupid question but it's a serious problem. I performed a quantization in IrfanView program and I would like to read the image in Matlab but the quantization change the bits from 24 to 8 ( 256 colour quantization). Matlab read this image as monochromatic with no RGB palletes. How can I read such an image in Matlab . Thanks.

[Walter Roberson]

Could you post a link to the resulting image? http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/7924-where-can-i-upload-images-and-files-for-use-on-matlab-answers

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Did you try to extract the palette with imread?

[indexedImage, colorMap] = imread(fullFileName);