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SageRoulade
SageRoulade
Participant
January 13, 2023
Answered

Unable to use SMPTE color space in illustrator?

  • January 13, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 502 views

Hello, very new user to illustrator trying to use the SMPTE color test bars as a palette. I expect there must be some setting needed to adjust the color display, but I'm not sure what that would be. Any ideas? Thanks! 

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Conrad_C

If the problem is that the colors in Illustrator look dull, the reason might be found in the tab for your document as shown in your screen shot. The tab is labeled with “CMYK” at the end. But CMYK is a print-oriented color gamut which is limited and doesn’t match up well to the color gamuts used in video editing. As a result, SMPTE color bars contain colors well outside CMYK. So if you are trying to increase the saturation of the color bars and it isn’t working, it might be because the Illustrator document was created in CMYK document mode.

 

The first thing to try is choose File > Document Color Mode > RGB Color. You might not see any difference right away, but switching to RGB color should let you make colors more saturated than they could be when it was in CMYK mode.

 

If you don’t need the color palette to be 100% accurate to SMPTE color bars, that might be all you need to do. But if you do need to match SMPTE colors exactly, there may be additional color management steps to perform. 

2 replies

Mylenium
Mylenium
Legend
January 14, 2023

As already laid out by Conrad, TV doesn't work in CMYK and from the huge deviations it's also clear that you are not using any color management. You can spend all day trying to get your SMPTE colors and they'll still be wrong without CM.

 

Mylenium

Conrad_C
Community Expert
Conrad_CCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
January 14, 2023

If the problem is that the colors in Illustrator look dull, the reason might be found in the tab for your document as shown in your screen shot. The tab is labeled with “CMYK” at the end. But CMYK is a print-oriented color gamut which is limited and doesn’t match up well to the color gamuts used in video editing. As a result, SMPTE color bars contain colors well outside CMYK. So if you are trying to increase the saturation of the color bars and it isn’t working, it might be because the Illustrator document was created in CMYK document mode.

 

The first thing to try is choose File > Document Color Mode > RGB Color. You might not see any difference right away, but switching to RGB color should let you make colors more saturated than they could be when it was in CMYK mode.

 

If you don’t need the color palette to be 100% accurate to SMPTE color bars, that might be all you need to do. But if you do need to match SMPTE colors exactly, there may be additional color management steps to perform. 

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