Colour Spaces, Profiles, Grading and Management
Technical information for how to consider and approach the use and need.
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6. Choosing the Right Profiles
It's essential that you keep your visual image's quality consistently high all the way through the production and post-production pipeline. At every step of the way, always choose the highest quality resolution profile that you need to support the highest quality output.
This activity focus is called: File Quality Management
The file image quality that we (Emily Carr student projects) use is applicable in many professional environments. It's different than a professional feature film production or for broadcast commercials, but this is still able to be played in professional theatres and in broadcast.OUR IMAGE PROFILE TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
- Image HEIGHT & WIDTH, Pixel Aspect Ratio
- 1920 x 1080, 1.0
- Image BIT-DEPTH
- 16-bit, 24-bit, 32-bit (Toon Boom uses 32-bit by default) (the bigger the bit depth, the larger the file size)
- Sound BIT-DEPTH, file format
- 24-bit, 48 kHz, WAV or AIF
- Image Colour Profile
- We choose the profile that is the best for the viewing destination and goal
- Rec. 709 Gamma 2.4: movie theatres, HD TV displays (home viewing), professional broadcast
- sRGB: classroom assignments and viewing, general desktop viewing, mobile devices, YouTube, online
- Working Colour Space
- Matching your image colour profile
- Rec 709 Gamma 2.4 for movie theatres, HD TV displays (home viewing), professional broadcast
- Rec. 709 Gamma 2.2: HD TV displays (home viewing)
- sRGB: classroom assignments and viewing, general desktop viewing, mobile devices, YouTube, online
- Viewing Colour Space
- Each image creation software has a viewing colour space that you can set. (Photoshop, Krita, Clip Studio Procreate)
- Photoshop's default is for viewing print colours, so always re-set it for digital media viewing. Not all software offers the options for setting this.
- Each image editing software (Premiere, After Effects) has it's own setting , which should change based on the project's working profile you choose.
- Each image creation software has a viewing colour space that you can set. (Photoshop, Krita, Clip Studio Procreate)
- Assets in the editing software
- You can re-set the profile associated with each asset (Premiere and Photoshop for example) to match your editing space, so you're not surprised when you export.
- You can re-set the profile associated with each asset (Premiere and Photoshop for example) to match your editing space, so you're not surprised when you export.
- Colour correct monitors and graphics card capabliities
- Consumer level: OS system reads and interprets or matches your image's profile to it. Usually sRGB colour (editing on your phone, your iPad)
- Pro-sumer level: OS has software and the hardware possibly has a good quality graphics card to allow user-selection of professional colour profiles; Rec709 and more. Editing on a Mac or PC workstation or high-end laptop.
- Professional, high end: display screens and graphics cards are the highest end and are professionally calibrated for broadcast quality colour viewing and editing.
MATCHING YOUR DISPLAY MONITOR'S PROFILE
The MAIN CONCEPT in selecting your software's "working colour space" is based on coordinating with your monitor's colour display profile. If you can bring these into partnership, your work looks it's best on the display monitor that you have.
Monitors will have a variety of colour profile options that are also based on the computer's OS.
To find and set your display monitor's colour profile
Mac: (Apple icon top left) > System Preferences > Displays > Color Profile
Your display monitor and a pull-down menu of options is here.
PC: Start > Color Management > Devices > your display monitor and a pull-down menu of options is here
SOFTWARE PROGRAM OPTIONS
Some media creation and editing software allow you to create or select the colour profiles, while some others make it rather difficult to do so. Here's an overview of some of our common programs:
ToonBoom Harmony allows you to affect your working space colour profiles for every individual layers (wow!) and to assign the colour space for the working file. Every single aspect of creating and compositing the image has its own colour space because compositing works with individual layers, which is what Harmony supports by doing this.
Here's how to assign your general working space profile in Harmony. Scene > Scene Settings > Colour Space tab
Premiere allows you to select the height + width in the Project Settings, and finds the bit-depth and colour profiles embedded in the imported clips. The colour space is pre-determined as a version of Rec. 709, but Premiere will make a viewing adjustment based on the display monitor's profile.
Premiere is much more fussy about changing the colour space away from Rec 709, and this Adobe Help doc explains how you can try to do this. Their advice is to NOT do it if your media and display monitor match. For example, your media colour profile is sRGB and your consumer level monitor is sRGB.
After Effects allows you to select the working colour space, bit depth, height and width in the Project Settings. Read about it here. There is a set of options, including Rec 709 (HDTV) and sRGB. Choose the option that best matches your display monitor.
File > Project Settings > Working Space...
When you import your footage, AFX applies colour profile management which prompts you to make a decision in "interpreting the footage" by selecting a colour profile or leaving "as is".
As in Premiere, After Effects colours are tweaked from their working colour space to the colour space of your computer monitor through the monitor profile. This conversion ensures that your composition will look identical on two different monitors if the monitors have been properly profiled. This conversion does not change the data within the composition's media.
You can choose whether or not to convert colours for your monitor using the View > Use Display Color Management menu command. (See Enable or disable display color management.) But, keep in mind that this conversion exists for a reason, which is to maintain visual consistency.
Photoshop allows you to easily establish the working colour space and the image colour profile. See the chapter in this Moodle booklet for that process. You can also read more about this online in Adobe Help.