<p>From a historical context, the YUV color encoding was originally designed to support the existing black-and-white infrastructure. In addition, as jooja mentioned, humans are generally less perceptive to changes in chroma and more perceptive to changes in luma. Both NTSC and PAL use less bandwidth for the chroma channel than the luma channel. In a digital context, we can use <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling" rel="nofollow noreferrer">chroma subsampling</a> to achieve the same effect.</p>

<p>YUV/YIQ/YDbDr is used for color PAL/NTSC/SECAM television broadcasts.<br>
YPbPr is used for component video cables.<br>
YCbCr is used for everything else.<br>
YCgCo is like YCbCr but is easier to compute.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-04-01T21:41:58.253Z
2017-04-01T21:41:58.253Z
AnimatedRNG
<p>Human eye is less sensitive to chrominance than luminance, which means you have a nifty way to compress the data by not measuring chrominance for each pixel, while you do measure luminance of all pixels. Although the black and white thing is part of the reason.</p>

<p>On the subject RGB might be more intuitive, but its not actually a very good intuition when you start going deeper into how the human senses actually work. As it turns out RGB is a gross simplification. RGB is not good for measuring how far away different colors are from each other visually for example.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-04-01T21:22:09.983Z
2017-04-01T21:22:09.983Z
joojaa
<p>RGB has the advantage over schemes like YP<sub>B</sub>P<sub>R</sub> in that it's more intuitive to understand, so why use the latter?  The only advantage I can think of right now is that it allows you to encode greyscale images more easily.  Is this the reason, or are there other reasons?</p>

<color>
What are the advantages of having two chroma channels and a luma channel vs. three chroma channels?
Legend of Overfiend
# What are the advantages of having two chroma channels and a luma channel vs. three chroma channels?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2017-04-01)

RGB has the advantage over schemes like YPBPR in that it's more intuitive to understand, so why use the latter? The only advantage I can think of right now is that it allows you to encode greyscale images more easily. Is this the reason, or are there other reasons?

**Tags:** color


---

## 2 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2017-04-01. Score: 4

From a historical context, the YUV color encoding was originally designed to support the existing black-and-white infrastructure. In addition, as jooja mentioned, humans are generally less perceptive to changes in chroma and more perceptive to changes in luma. Both NTSC and PAL use less bandwidth for the chroma channel than the luma channel. In a digital context, we can use [chroma subsampling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling) to achieve the same effect.

YUV/YIQ/YDbDr is used for color PAL/NTSC/SECAM television broadcasts.  
YPbPr is used for component video cables.  
YCbCr is used for everything else.  
YCgCo is like YCbCr but is easier to compute.


---

### Answer by username_2 on 2017-04-01. Score: 2

Human eye is less sensitive to chrominance than luminance, which means you have a nifty way to compress the data by not measuring chrominance for each pixel, while you do measure luminance of all pixels. Although the black and white thing is part of the reason.

On the subject RGB might be more intuitive, but its not actually a very good intuition when you start going deeper into how the human senses actually work. As it turns out RGB is a gross simplification. RGB is not good for measuring how far away different colors are from each other visually for example.


---

