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Managing Color With ColorSync


Color-Component Values, Color Values, and Colors

Each of the color spaces described here requires one or more numeric values in a particular format to specify a color.

Each dimension, or component, in a color space has a color-component value. An unsigned 16-bit color-component value can vary from 0 to 65,535 (0xFFFF), although the numerical interpretation of that range is different for different color spaces. In most cases, color-component intensities are interpreted numerically as varying between 0 and 1.0. An exception occurs for the a* and b* channels of the Lab color space, where values ranging from 0 to 65,535 are interpreted numerically as varying from -128.0 to approximately 128.0.

Depending on the color space, one, two, three, or four color-component values combine to make a color value. For HiFi colors, up to eight color-component values combine to make a color. A color value is a structure; it is the complete specification of a color in a given color space.


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