PIL's colour space conversion YCbCr -> RGB

Question

The algorithm used by PIL v1.1.7 gives \'washed out\' looking results. When converting the same source data using ffmpeg it looks correct. Using mplayer

Answer 1

If you look at Wikipedia's definitions, you can see that there are two conflicting definitions for YCbCr. The ITU-R BT.601 definition compresses the values to the range 16-235 to provide footroom and headroom, while the JPEG version uses the full range 0-255. If you were to decode values in the BT.601 space using the formula for JPEG, the result would definitely look washed out.