Adobe 65008009 - After Effects CS4 Technical Paper page 22

neutral-balanced color spaces
Some color spaces define neutral colors as equal amounts of red, green, and blue. Other color
spaces—usually those that represent color rendering properties of real-world devices—do not
define neutral color as equal amounts of red, green, and blue. Defining neutral colors using equal
amounts of red, green, and blue can be handy when color-correcting images. If you know that
a particular part of a scene is neutral, you can ensure that those areas contain equal amounts of
red, green, and blue. Examples of neutral-balanced profiles are the Adobe-supplied video profiles
(HDTV (Rec. 709), SDTV NTSC, SDTV PAL) as well as commonly used profiles like sRGB
IEC619-66-2.1, Adobe RGB (1998), and ProPhoto RGB). Examples of profiles that are not neutral-
balanced are the Adobe-supplied profiles for digital cinema cameras and projectors, and profiles
for negative and print film stocks.
using the universal Camera film Printing density profile as a project working space
The Universal Camera Film Printing Density color space is a good choice as a project working
space when compositing for cinema workflows using Cineon scans from camera film. There are a
couple of reasons to choose this profile.
• If you select this profile as your project working space (and do not linearize this
working space) and also used this profile to interpret footage, the DPX log values
in the Info panel will not change after import. This can be helpful to those that are
familiar with 10-bit log values and prefer to control color using these values.
• In some cases, converting colors into the project working space will cause channel
cross-talk and produce negative values. This may be true for cases were highly satu-
rated colors in film scans are interpreted using ICC profiles for specific film stocks.
Using the Universal Camera Film Printing Density profile to interpret footage and as
project working space eliminates this potential problem.
Color management workflow in Adobe After Effects CS4 22