Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Colour Management => Topic started by: mbalensiefer on June 29, 2012, 11:07:55 am
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I have TIFFs in the YCbCr color space.
Apparently, Y′CbCr is not an absolute color space; rather it is a way of encoding RGB information.
These will be displayed on an RGB monitor. Will converting these images to RGB lose any color information?
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Your TIFF is already an RGB image. It might be a still from a video that is chroma sampled.
Y'CbCr has no place in the TIFF specification. Y'CbCr is the currency of video land - in TIFF land they don't speak that language. RGB is a color model. Y'CbCr is a chroma sampling and video encoding specification (compression for video) that is a digital byproduct of other similar analog specs, like YPbPr, etc.
Neither of them are color spaces.
If your TIFF came from a video shot on an HD camera, it is probably in the Rec. 709/sRGB color space (same thing, almost). If it came from a PAL SD camera, it is in the PAL color space. If it came from an NTSC SD camera, it is in the NTSC color space. If it came from a RAW camera (like the Alexa, F65 or Red), then it might have its own proprietary color space (like Red or the F65) or maybe it's like a still camera RAW file (ArriRAW) which doesn't have a color space yet. Also, higher-end video cameras have LUTs, special-gammas and S-Logs that make things complicated.
To answer your question: The file won't lose information - but you might have already lost information in your TIFF conversion. Need more specific information for a better answer.
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It's a good answer!
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Y'CbCr has no place in the TIFF specification.
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/tiff/TIFF6.pdf
it has a place there as TIFF extension, as well as CMYK, LAB, etc
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You are correct. Thanks for pointing it out.