AE CS4 Color Settings – “Working Space:” = confusion?

[Todd Kopriva]

When you’re using color management, the colors of your various footage items are converted into a common color space. The project’s working space is that common color space.

It’s that simple.

Deciding what color space to choose for your project’s working space is a little less simple. If you’re only outputting to one medium, then it makes sense to set the project working space to be the same as the color space for your output type.

If you’re _not_ using color management, then the working space is irrelevant. Note that you turn color management on by choosing a working space for your project.

I strongly recommend that you read the “Color management overview” section of After Effects Help and the color management workflow paper and tutorials that it points to.

———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————

[Robert Combs]

Hi Todd I’m still confused.
I watched the tutorial you mentioned and that answered some other questions I had. but….

I’ve set the Working Space to “SDTV NTSC 16-235”

How can I still be getting a value of 255?

Sorry for being dim about bright text but I’m still confused.

Can you or anyone else explain?
Thanks,

-Rob

[Chris Wright]

perhaps you’re confused about the color space compared to legal signals. In color finesse for instance, you can setup the smart limiter to limit down to 235 and the eyedropper will never go above 235 rgb in the brightest spots.