What does chrominance mean?
Chrominance is the component of a colour video or television signal that conveys colour information — specifically hue and saturation — independently of the signal's brightness, which is carried separately by its luminance counterpart. The separation dates from the early days of colour broadcasting, when engineers designed composite signals so that existing monochrome televisions could display the luminance part normally while simply discarding the chrominance data. In modern practice, the term appears throughout video engineering, standards such as YCbCr, and digital image compression: because the human eye perceives fine detail mainly through brightness rather than colour, chrominance channels are frequently stored at reduced resolution with little visible loss. The word derives from Greek chrōma, meaning colour, combined with a suffix suggesting quality of colour. Though firmly technical in register, chrominance remains essential vocabulary for anyone working with video signals, colour science, or image processing.
nounThe component of a colour television or video signal that carries information about hue and saturation, as distinct from the luminance component that carries brightness. It is typically transmitted separately so that black-and-white receivers can ignore it.
- The part of a composite video or television signal that encodes hue and colour saturation, separate from luminance (brightness), allowing compatibility with monochrome receivers.
"The broadcast engineer adjusted the chrominance to correct the oversaturated reds in the footage."
"Poorly aligned chrominance caused the green grass to bleed into the white lines of the football pitch."
"In YCbCr digital video, the two chrominance channels are often subsampled because human vision resolves colour less sharply than brightness."
Chrominance is an uncountable (mass) noun and has no standard plural form.
"The encoder compresses the chrominance more aggressively than the luminance."
When the NTSC engineers split colour into 'chrominance' in 1953, they made sure old black-and-white TVs could simply throw the colour away — which is why your grandparents' set never saw red.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of chrominance
Chrominance was coined in the mid-twentieth century by broadcast engineers developing compatible colour television, formed from the Greek root chrōma ('colour') on the pattern of the earlier term luminance. It belongs to the same family of technical coinages as chroma and chromaticity, all ultimately tracing back to that Greek word for colour. Its adoption spread alongside colour broadcasting systems such as NTSC and PAL, where distinguishing colour from brightness was central to signal design.
How chrominance is actually used
A technical term used almost exclusively in broadcasting, video engineering, and image-processing contexts; it is rarely encountered in everyday speech. It is an uncountable noun.
Easily confused with chrominance
Luminance is the brightness component of a video signal, whereas chrominance is the colour (hue and saturation) component.
Chromaticity refers to the objective colour qualities of light described by hue and saturation independent of brightness, while chrominance is the portion of a video signal encoding those qualities.