Color and Mastering for Digital Cinema

3Color Space for Digital Cinema

Historically, color imaging systems have used a variety of tri-chromatic color encoding approaches, commonly called color spaces. Representing color as additive mixtures of three stimuli is based on research and characterization of the human visual system, and can be traced to properties of the underlying photo-sensitive receptors on the retina of the human eye.

The photo-receptors in the eye fall into two categories, rods and cones, so called for their physical shape. Color vision is derived from the output of the cones at normal levels of illumination. This photopic vision requires luminances of several cd/m² or more. There are three types of cones, sensitive to long, medium, and short regions of the human visual ...