- [Instructor] When we think of color,
well, the truth is we tend to not think about it
much at all really.
We see things and interpret what we see
as best we can.
The rods and cones in our eyes
capture light differently.
In this way, our eyes have a color system.
Cameras, computers, and displays do, too.
And different color systems exist
that are used to capture images in cameras,
then another system's used to record the information.
Another system stores it,
yet another system reads it,
and another displays it.
It's pretty vague and unhelpful, isn't it?
Actually, the systems all work in pretty familiar ways
but with new names.
When capturing color, we have a challenge.
Cameras can't capture all the colors
that appear in the real world.
And when we say color,
I suppose we should give that word a meaning,
which is generally considered to be the colors
our eyes can see.
There are colors outside the visible spectrum.
You've probably heard of ultraviolet
or infrared, for example.
But these aren't particularly meaningful to us as colors
because the only we can see them
is by converting them into something else.
Infrared cameras turn infrared light into visible light.
So again, when I say color,
I mean color visible to the naked eye.
Cameras can't capture all the colors your eyes can see.
Instead, they capture an acceptable range of colors.
It's enough for us not to notice
how much is missing, we hope.
And they record the information
in a number of different ways.
You've heard of RGB.
That's the red, green, and blue color information
for each pixel stored as separate numbers.
And these numbers are based on the bit depth
we looked at earlier.
Regardless of the bit depth,
each color is recorded in a range
that goes from no color at all
to the maximum amount of color saturation
that can be recorded, or later can be displayed.
As much as possible,
manufacturers try to align these two things,
the recording and the displaying,
to make it easier to control the way your video
or still image will look.
If you adjust the brightness of your screen, of course,
you're changing the relationship
between what's captured by the camera
and what's displayed,
which is why professional editors
use carefully-calibrated monitors.
These are set to match industry standards.
Many cameras use a color system called YUV,
and we'll talk more about this later.
This system uses clever calculations
to get more information stored with less data.
Printers use CMYK,
which is cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks
that selectively remove color from white paper.
And we'll talk more about this later, too.
And there's sRGB, used by computer monitors,
which is a smaller range of colors
than the potential range of RGB.
But it works on the same principle.
All of these so-called color systems
have one thing in common.
They tend to store color information in a systematic way
to make it possible for screens to display
an accurate representation of what was originally recorded.
Color systems like this are sometimes called color modes.
Sometimes they're called color space.
Think of the area shown on a graph
that's included inside the color system.
It might seem you have several options,
but the color mode you work in
will largely be defined by your output
or preferred working method.
Some people like to have
a larger range of colors to work with,
though the delivered media will have a smaller range.
Some people prefer to work
with the smaller range from the start,
to be sure everything's going to fit well.
When I say range of colors,
I'm not so much speaking about a particular range of hues.
You'll find the full range of hues your eyes can perceive
will be included in all the color systems you'll work with.
Rather, we're talking about a maximum amount of saturation
or intensity for a particular color.
You may be able to perceive more color saturation
than a camera can capture
or a display can, well, display.