Legacy Document

Inside Macintosh: Advanced Color Imaging on the Mac OS /

Chapter 3 - Introduction to the ColorSync Manager / Introduction to Color and Color Management Systems

Color-Component Values, Color Values, and Colors

Each of the color spaces described in this chapter 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. A 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.

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.