From the course: Photoshop for Video Editors: Core Skills

Understanding image mode

From the course: Photoshop for Video Editors: Core Skills

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Understanding image mode

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- Since Photoshop is an application that's designed to be used in many different industries, you may find that not every picture or graphic is ready for video. One of these areas is color space. This is because it's possible that you might be working with a graphic that was intended for professional print output. Let me show you. In this case, I've got three images opened up. And two of these images indicate that they are using RGB, while one says CMYK. Well, the RGB images, if we go over to the channels tab here, have a red, green and blue icon. Let's make those a little bit larger here, so you can see that better. And we'll just bump up the size of the thumbnail. Notice that this indicates the coverage of a particular color. For example, there's a high value of red indicated by a brightness here in this area of the channel. Well, not surprisingly, that correlates to a high presence of red in these tomatoes and some of the apples. However, this image has much less greens and blues. You'll see that there's a little bit of green back here in some of these apples, and overall very little blue in the scene, as indicated by high values of darker tones. The only place where the blue is really present, is on these highly reflective surfaces where the daylight was reflected, but red, green and blue, RGB adds up to pure white light. So if you ever were to take white light and split it apart with a prism, you might have heard of ROYGBIV. Or essentially red, green and blue is creating this model of additive color. Now, in the print world, we use a different model called CMYK, cyan, magenta, yellow and black or key. In this case, the different color inks are being used. Here you can see the presence of cyan, which tends to be more of a blue, the magenta, which tends to be more of the pinkish tone. And when those two tones are laid together, you can clearly see where the cyan and the magenta is being covered. Yellow is another color here, and not a lot of yellow in this particular image, and then the use of black. Black indicates the amount of the key or the total definition. These all add up to create an image. Well, when you look at these, they look just fine and everything seems to be working. Where the problem happens, is when you import these into a lot of video editing tools, colors can really shift where you get outright errors. I'll launch Premiere Pro here, and just make a project called tester. Now let's import that folder. File, Import. I'll navigate to those recently used images there, and bring them in. And you'll notice that we got a file import error. Well, that was the CMYK image. The two images that were RGB, imported just fine, but Premiere could not handle the CMYK image. And it's not alone. Most video tools at the fundamental side work with RGB, or while they might use other color spaces, they're all compatible with RGB. If you try to bring in a graphic that's for print, it's typically not going to work. So what do you do about it? Well, over in Photoshop, it's pretty easy to convert. If you have an image open in CMYK, what you would simply do is choose image, mode and just select RGB. You'll notice very little to no change whatsoever in the image itself, and now that image is ready for import. However, when we go from RGB to CMYK in the world of print, there is a shift. So we can for example say, that we want to see a gamut warning. And in this case, it's indicating areas in the image that when we convert from RGB to CMYK, that are going to shift. However, you're not worried about print output. So if you get a CMYK image, you can safely convert it to RGB and it will still maintain its same relative appearance, but we'll work with video software.

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