black vs. black

[housepig]

I know I've seen this somewhere, but I'll be damned if I can dig it up.

I need to know the rgb or hex values of black for video display, so that when I make menus and graphics in Photoshop or Gimp, the blacks show up correctly onscreen.

so what are the legal video values for black (and white, while I'm at it?)

[Supreme2k]

I always thought it was:

BLACK
R: 0
G: 0
B: 0

or
H:255
S:0
L:0


WHITE
R: 255
G: 255
B: 255

or
H:255
S:0
L:255

[p0rnLiME]

I have nothing better to do right now, so I'm posting the hex values...

Black: 000000
White: ffffff

[dphirschler]

Actually, I think "black" is about 8% brighter than #000000. But I don't know the actual number. I do know that a capture card I recently have been considering has been criticized because it captures pure black instead of "broadcast" black.


Darryl

[JimJohnD]

Check out http://signvideo.com/dv-black-level-dvd-7.5-ire-0-ntsc-part-2.htm

[mpack]

so what are the legal video values for black (and white, while I'm at it?)

I think the legal values are 16 (0x10)(black) to 235 (0xEB)(white), inclusive. Values below 16 and above 235 are reserved for superblacks and superwhites, which have meaning to signal level compensation circuits in the TV or other receiver.

I would be careful however. A lot of authoring software will expect the .BMP or .JPG etc to use the full gamut of a PC image, and they will scale the pixel values into the legal range during encoding (say of an MPEG still menu background). If you do it as well then the range will have been squeezed twice, and the picture will look washed out - it will have lost contrast. Some software (eg. TMPGEnc I think) gives you the option of whether it does this Y level range conversion or not.