CompuServe Messages

Chris, First you need to talk with a video editor and have him explain how he uses Bars to calibrate the video source (ie your animation or whatever.) If you go into a paint package and read the values from each of the colors you can see you maximum saturation and luminance values. On the other hand 3DS has a built-in video color check which works well. >> Is there additional information … on really safe colors and palettes? If you stay below the max saturation and luminance values, you will be safe. The rest is a matter of aesthetics. Highly saturated reds don't work but you can get aesthetically pleasing reds that don't "bloom". >> I have heard that NBC, for example, has spent many many dollars and years developing working colors. << I'll check but this seems rather unlikely. There are algorithms that are applied to an entire image to make them "color safe" or "video safe". A program I use is by Elastic Reality which converts RGB to YUV for output to D1. I've never had to worry about my colors, and the rest is an aesthetic use of color. Some colors do work better than others but there are so many combinations, I think it would be hard to define what works best with what, though in print they have books with color combinations that are aesthetic. You could use these as a guide. John