**Setting the Right Color Range for OBS Studio**

When it comes to capturing high-quality video footage, especially for live streaming and recording purposes, it's essential to set the right color range. In this article, we'll explore some common settings that can make a significant difference in the quality of your captured footage.

For many capture cards and webcams, using the full range of the device's capabilities can result in garbage-in-garbage-out effects. This means that even if the original signal is of high quality, the compression and encoding process can introduce unwanted artifacts and loss of detail. One way to mitigate this issue is by setting the color range to partial or limited.

When using OBS Studio, you'll typically want to leave the Advanced tab settings to "partial" instead of the default "auto" option. This ensures that the software doesn't over-compress the signal, which can result in a loss of detail and a less-than-ideal viewing experience. However, if your capture device supports it, you may need to manually adjust the color range setting to "full" in order to get the best possible results.

In particular, some capture cards and webcams use MJPEG encoding, which can introduce issues with RGB color range mismatch. This means that even if the original signal is of high quality, the compressed footage may appear washed out or lacking in contrast. In such cases, setting the color range to "full" may be necessary to get the best possible results.

**Recommended Settings for Capture Cards**

For capture cards, it's essential to follow these settings:

* Leave OBS Studio Advanced tab settings to "partial"

* If using a capture card that supports it, set the color range to "full" in the device properties

* Avoid setting the color range to "auto" or "partial" if your device doesn't support full-range encoding

Some popular capture cards, such as those from Elgato and AVerMedia, offer built-in software drivers that allow you to manually adjust the color range. For example, the Elgato HD60S has a built-in settings menu that allows you to toggle between "pool" and "partial" modes.

**Camera Settings: The Panasonic G7**

When it comes to cameras, one popular choice among streamers is the Panasonic G7. This camera offers 4K at 30fps and 1080p at 60fps, making it an excellent option for capturing high-quality footage. However, when setting up the G7 for recording or live streaming, it's essential to use the correct color range settings.

According to popular streamer Caleb Pike, who has extensively reviewed the G7 in his guide on setting it up, you should always set the camera to "limited" mode (0-2 or 16-255) when capturing footage. This ensures that the camera doesn't introduce unwanted artifacts and loss of detail due to RGB color range mismatch.

**Testing and Adjusting Color Range**

One way to ensure that your captured footage looks its best is by testing different color range settings and adjusting them accordingly. For example, if you're using a capture card that doesn't support full-range encoding, setting the color range to "partial" may be the best option. Alternatively, if you're using a camera like the G7, which has known issues with RGB color range mismatch, setting it to "limited" mode may be necessary.

Ultimately, the key is to experiment and find the settings that work best for your specific capture device and workflow. By following these guidelines and adjusting your settings accordingly, you can ensure that your captured footage looks its best and meets your streaming or recording requirements.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhave you ever been watching a live stream or perhaps checking back on your own and feeling like the gameplay was super washed out or perhaps on the other end looking way too dark and punchy well that has to do with the rgb color ranges in obs or your capture card settings being mismatched with your video source or just being set wrong entirely it's a very confusing and weird subject for many and it takes a lot of definition navigating to really get the grasp of but i'm gonna make it super easy to help you decide what you need to be using when it comes to limited or partial versus full rgb ranges in obs studio streamlabs obs any obs based program as well as your capture card settings i hope you're ready for this because it's going to be super technical but it's something you need to know as a streamer let's go this video is brought to you by nerd or die and their new overdrive stream package this just came out a couple days ago turn the volume up to 11 and put the pedal to the metal overdrive is a grungy high impact stream package made for an energetic vibe let your audience know what's up it's got some pretty cool graphics in it i love it if i wasn't currently going i mean i've been doing this for years but like if my main focus wasn't on the retro vhs kind of aesthetic i would 100 be using this right now but i may still snag some of the web webcam frames from it anyway the first 20 people to use my link in the description below and the coupon code epos 50 off will get 50 off of overdrive the rest of you can save 15 with the normal coupon code eposvox link in the description below eposvox gg slash nerd or die go check it out back to the video so the rgb color range used in a video signal can either be limited partial or legal range depending on where you're seeing it defined or full range this can honestly sound super misleading as you might hear okay i want the full range of colors because i want all of the possible information but that's not actually true there's a reason that limited or partial range was actually called legal range back in older video broadcast days and it has to do with how color compression could be handled for broadcast and how broadcast signals can handle it and things like that and in the digital age it may seem a little silly but tvs and especially game consoles hooked up to tvs and things like that still operate in the limited range so what we're talking about here is the range of color options available on an 8-bit video signal which is 0 to 255 because there's only 256 color values in 8 bit now a tv like i said or a game console will only handle 16 to 235 and anything 16 or below is fully black unlimited range and anything 235 or higher is fully white so there's no extra information in those categories this is how most tv signals work this is how most tvs work this is how what most game consoles work and this is how most of your settings should be set up now there is rgb full where 255 is full 100 reference white and 0 is full completely reference black there are no values within the 8-bit signal below 0 or above 255. to make this easy for you ultimately you rarely ever want to ever be using rgb full for anything so right now you need to go into your obs streamlabs obs or obs.live or any program based on obs and check your advanced tab settings and make sure color range is set to partial that should be set no matter what you should virtually never be recording or streaming from obs with full range web browsers are only set up to interpret partial ranges in most cases so you're going to get some really wonky looking colors if you stream full in the first place and a lot of video editors actually have issues with full range video as well i had apparently during one of my screen capture obs profiles set up full range and i kept getting confused while the color swatches that i had gotten for backgrounds of twitter dark mode youtube dark mode and things like that kept showing up as different shades of gray or black and that was because in full range they were a lot darker than they were in limited range because the color wasn't being interpreted properly in premiere nor davinci resolve despite the fact that you know professional video editors you think could handle it there are still issues decoding that especially in h.264 which is mainly intended to use limited range and h.264 is what you're using for the vast majority of your captures and streams that's definitely what you're using for actual live streams as well so to make it easy for you make sure everything's set to limited we're gonna get into some nuance here however but that does mean that every step in your chain needs to be set to limited because you could end up in some weird issues where you think you're set up properly but things still look washed out or they still look too dark and that's usually caused by a mismatch of those settings meaning either your console is set incorrectly different from your capture card and your obs settings or your capture card set wrong or something like that so in your game console system for example under xbox it's under the video settings same thing as playstation 4 it's under the tv and display settings you need to set it from pc rgb you need you can use pcrgb for playing if you're playing on a pc monitor but if you're streaming you pretty much always want to have that set to limited or standard range depending on which console you're using then in your video capture device properties in obs studio you need to set that to partial as well now in the vast majority of cases automatic will work because it will detect it based on the signal being sent to it so you can leave it on auto but if you have ever messed with it at one point you need to make sure that it's at least on auto if not partial then of course make sure obs is set to partial as well now you should also be using rec709 colors for pretty much anything hd so go ahead and set that it doesn't make a huge difference but it's still worth setting and then everything should look properly i have had some examples on screen where you can see the difference when things aren't set quite right this is especially noticeable on xbox even even going back to the xbox 360. playstation 4 somehow handles that a little bit better however there are exceptions and we need to talk about those but before we talk about those we should talk about the elephant in the room and that is pc gameplay capture yes in your pc monitor settings you can set or your nvidia control panel or whatever you can leave your computer monitor on rgb full that is considered acceptable your capture card will still down sample that properly to partial as long as it's set to partial in the video capture properties that way what you're seeing on your monitor and what you're playing or you know using in your screen capture is fine good to go you don't notice any difference because it's the same but then your capture card is doing that damn you know that down conversion from full to partial if you're using display capture screen capture window capture sources even if your monitor's set to full range in your control panel settings the window capture process and obs itself being set to partial we'll do that down sampling so you're good to go there as well now there are exceptions and a few of you have reached out to me because the my own previous recommendations actually contradicted what ends up happening with these exceptions and there are two different situations where you might want to set your capture device to full but you still leave obs on partial the first one of those is if you're using a capture card that supports 444 rgb chroma sub sampling now there's not very many of these capture cards i will have a link in the video description with a documentation page on my website eposvox.com where you can see which capture cards actually support it and this is a little bit confusing because previously it was pretty obvious based on which video modes were exposed in obs studio for your giving capture card but in recent years elgato have actually added driver updates to their capture cards which enable these other modes that the cards technically do not operate in but it emulates them basically upward from nv12 to xrgb and so it'll show it but then it won't look quite right because it's not actually running at that so i have a page linked in the video description documenting it another option if you really want to check for yourself is pull up amarectv it is a recording app i covered it in my recording lossless video video back about a week ago linked in the video description when you pull up your available capture card it'll show you the different color mode feeds available from your capture card and ideally that should not show the emulated ones so specifically this is relevant with magewell or avermedia capture cards the live gamer 4k and the live gamer ultra both support 444 rgb and i have recommended this especially for pixel art games for people using the open source scan converter who want every pixel completely uncompressed for scaling to 4k and things like that i have suggested enabling xrgb for the highest quality chroma sub sampling to get the best final result and then people have ended up with really dark video and they couldn't figure out why and that is because the 444 rgb color space runs on full rgb color range and so you need to enable that in your capture device so you would open up your capture device properties in obs studio or streamlabs obs or whatever and leave it on xrgb but change it from auto or partial down to full because i've probably told you before to set it to partial this is true of quite a few capture cards that could support it as well as anyone pretty much anyone doing retro game captures you kind of want to keep those pixels completely crisp until the last possible second garbage in garbage out another situation similar to this is using capture cards or even webcams that use m jpeg encoding because the m jpeg encoding that they use sometimes uses the full range and so you will need to set it to full in obs studio again auto may still work but it can be hit or miss with some of the cheaper knockoff capture cards i've actually got a couple of these i'm going to be reviewing soon it can be hit or miss so you may need to manually specify and you'll need to leave it on full but again obs in the advanced tab needs to be left on partial because it still needs to do that final squishing of the signal into partial in order to work with your live stream your recording or what have you now if you are using mage block capture cards their own driver software actually will give you the option to manually stretch it back out to pool or squish it down to partial or whatever so regardless of your video signal it'll pretty much handle it their cards are like magic i love it but they're super expensive but these are generally the settings you should be using there's one more exception which will only apply to some people but i wanted to go ahead and mention and that is with the camera the panasonic g7 this was my go-to recommendation for a video camera for a streaming camera for a very long time because you can get them cheap under 500 most of the time sometimes even cheaper they do 4k 30. it is absolutely beautiful they do 1080p 60. but i whenever i first set this up i watched caleb pike over at dslr video shooters his guide on setting this up and he always recommended not even for live streaming purposes but for general recording purposes to go into the camera settings and set it to limited range which they read as 0 to 2 or 16 to 255 even though it's supposed to be 235 because the full range videos out of this at least at the time and last time i checked this was still true those did not work in premiere or resolve they were way too dark in contrasty and it didn't make any sense and even the same thing i have tested more recently running into my black magic capture cards i was like well those capture cards can handle the full range it's fine i open it up and then still when i import it into davinci resolve it's not great if you're not really sure what to use i would pull up some reference gameplay either on your console or through another hdmi feed that you know what it's supposed to look like the colors the contrast the levels things like that keep an eye on what it's supposed to look like and then run it through your capture card and toggle it between partial and full and see what it looks like and see which looks best to you especially if you're using some of these generic capture cards the tiny little 15 usb capture card i reviewed before doesn't seem to have a fully linear translation of color space in it and so it's not fully partial but it's not fully full either so partial is the best route with it but it's still not exactly perfect and so i would recommend just playing with it to be certain but again but what you should have taken away from this is that obs in the advanced tab should always be left on partial anyway it is only in certain circumstances in the video capture device properties for a webcam or capture card where you might set that to full but never obs itself i know this is super nerdy and focusing on a tiny little detail that a lot of people don't care to pay attention to but there are so many streams and videos out there of video especially console gameplay where it's super washed out or people need to add extra contrast and saturation and trash their footage further because it looks too washed out or it's too dark and punchy which is harder to encode because of rgb color range mismatch and i wanted to help clear the air a little bit here i hope this video has been helpful for you if it has hit the like button subscribe for more tech education and stream guides go check out our sponsored nerd or die and their new overdrive stream layout i'm opposed to oxford stream professor the one and only stream professor the guy who's been around for 10 years covering streaming topics it's crazy i'll see you next timehave you ever been watching a live stream or perhaps checking back on your own and feeling like the gameplay was super washed out or perhaps on the other end looking way too dark and punchy well that has to do with the rgb color ranges in obs or your capture card settings being mismatched with your video source or just being set wrong entirely it's a very confusing and weird subject for many and it takes a lot of definition navigating to really get the grasp of but i'm gonna make it super easy to help you decide what you need to be using when it comes to limited or partial versus full rgb ranges in obs studio streamlabs obs any obs based program as well as your capture card settings i hope you're ready for this because it's going to be super technical but it's something you need to know as a streamer let's go this video is brought to you by nerd or die and their new overdrive stream package this just came out a couple days ago turn the volume up to 11 and put the pedal to the metal overdrive is a grungy high impact stream package made for an energetic vibe let your audience know what's up it's got some pretty cool graphics in it i love it if i wasn't currently going i mean i've been doing this for years but like if my main focus wasn't on the retro vhs kind of aesthetic i would 100 be using this right now but i may still snag some of the web webcam frames from it anyway the first 20 people to use my link in the description below and the coupon code epos 50 off will get 50 off of overdrive the rest of you can save 15 with the normal coupon code eposvox link in the description below eposvox gg slash nerd or die go check it out back to the video so the rgb color range used in a video signal can either be limited partial or legal range depending on where you're seeing it defined or full range this can honestly sound super misleading as you might hear okay i want the full range of colors because i want all of the possible information but that's not actually true there's a reason that limited or partial range was actually called legal range back in older video broadcast days and it has to do with how color compression could be handled for broadcast and how broadcast signals can handle it and things like that and in the digital age it may seem a little silly but tvs and especially game consoles hooked up to tvs and things like that still operate in the limited range so what we're talking about here is the range of color options available on an 8-bit video signal which is 0 to 255 because there's only 256 color values in 8 bit now a tv like i said or a game console will only handle 16 to 235 and anything 16 or below is fully black unlimited range and anything 235 or higher is fully white so there's no extra information in those categories this is how most tv signals work this is how most tvs work this is how what most game consoles work and this is how most of your settings should be set up now there is rgb full where 255 is full 100 reference white and 0 is full completely reference black there are no values within the 8-bit signal below 0 or above 255. to make this easy for you ultimately you rarely ever want to ever be using rgb full for anything so right now you need to go into your obs streamlabs obs or obs.live or any program based on obs and check your advanced tab settings and make sure color range is set to partial that should be set no matter what you should virtually never be recording or streaming from obs with full range web browsers are only set up to interpret partial ranges in most cases so you're going to get some really wonky looking colors if you stream full in the first place and a lot of video editors actually have issues with full range video as well i had apparently during one of my screen capture obs profiles set up full range and i kept getting confused while the color swatches that i had gotten for backgrounds of twitter dark mode youtube dark mode and things like that kept showing up as different shades of gray or black and that was because in full range they were a lot darker than they were in limited range because the color wasn't being interpreted properly in premiere nor davinci resolve despite the fact that you know professional video editors you think could handle it there are still issues decoding that especially in h.264 which is mainly intended to use limited range and h.264 is what you're using for the vast majority of your captures and streams that's definitely what you're using for actual live streams as well so to make it easy for you make sure everything's set to limited we're gonna get into some nuance here however but that does mean that every step in your chain needs to be set to limited because you could end up in some weird issues where you think you're set up properly but things still look washed out or they still look too dark and that's usually caused by a mismatch of those settings meaning either your console is set incorrectly different from your capture card and your obs settings or your capture card set wrong or something like that so in your game console system for example under xbox it's under the video settings same thing as playstation 4 it's under the tv and display settings you need to set it from pc rgb you need you can use pcrgb for playing if you're playing on a pc monitor but if you're streaming you pretty much always want to have that set to limited or standard range depending on which console you're using then in your video capture device properties in obs studio you need to set that to partial as well now in the vast majority of cases automatic will work because it will detect it based on the signal being sent to it so you can leave it on auto but if you have ever messed with it at one point you need to make sure that it's at least on auto if not partial then of course make sure obs is set to partial as well now you should also be using rec709 colors for pretty much anything hd so go ahead and set that it doesn't make a huge difference but it's still worth setting and then everything should look properly i have had some examples on screen where you can see the difference when things aren't set quite right this is especially noticeable on xbox even even going back to the xbox 360. playstation 4 somehow handles that a little bit better however there are exceptions and we need to talk about those but before we talk about those we should talk about the elephant in the room and that is pc gameplay capture yes in your pc monitor settings you can set or your nvidia control panel or whatever you can leave your computer monitor on rgb full that is considered acceptable your capture card will still down sample that properly to partial as long as it's set to partial in the video capture properties that way what you're seeing on your monitor and what you're playing or you know using in your screen capture is fine good to go you don't notice any difference because it's the same but then your capture card is doing that damn you know that down conversion from full to partial if you're using display capture screen capture window capture sources even if your monitor's set to full range in your control panel settings the window capture process and obs itself being set to partial we'll do that down sampling so you're good to go there as well now there are exceptions and a few of you have reached out to me because the my own previous recommendations actually contradicted what ends up happening with these exceptions and there are two different situations where you might want to set your capture device to full but you still leave obs on partial the first one of those is if you're using a capture card that supports 444 rgb chroma sub sampling now there's not very many of these capture cards i will have a link in the video description with a documentation page on my website eposvox.com where you can see which capture cards actually support it and this is a little bit confusing because previously it was pretty obvious based on which video modes were exposed in obs studio for your giving capture card but in recent years elgato have actually added driver updates to their capture cards which enable these other modes that the cards technically do not operate in but it emulates them basically upward from nv12 to xrgb and so it'll show it but then it won't look quite right because it's not actually running at that so i have a page linked in the video description documenting it another option if you really want to check for yourself is pull up amarectv it is a recording app i covered it in my recording lossless video video back about a week ago linked in the video description when you pull up your available capture card it'll show you the different color mode feeds available from your capture card and ideally that should not show the emulated ones so specifically this is relevant with magewell or avermedia capture cards the live gamer 4k and the live gamer ultra both support 444 rgb and i have recommended this especially for pixel art games for people using the open source scan converter who want every pixel completely uncompressed for scaling to 4k and things like that i have suggested enabling xrgb for the highest quality chroma sub sampling to get the best final result and then people have ended up with really dark video and they couldn't figure out why and that is because the 444 rgb color space runs on full rgb color range and so you need to enable that in your capture device so you would open up your capture device properties in obs studio or streamlabs obs or whatever and leave it on xrgb but change it from auto or partial down to full because i've probably told you before to set it to partial this is true of quite a few capture cards that could support it as well as anyone pretty much anyone doing retro game captures you kind of want to keep those pixels completely crisp until the last possible second garbage in garbage out another situation similar to this is using capture cards or even webcams that use m jpeg encoding because the m jpeg encoding that they use sometimes uses the full range and so you will need to set it to full in obs studio again auto may still work but it can be hit or miss with some of the cheaper knockoff capture cards i've actually got a couple of these i'm going to be reviewing soon it can be hit or miss so you may need to manually specify and you'll need to leave it on full but again obs in the advanced tab needs to be left on partial because it still needs to do that final squishing of the signal into partial in order to work with your live stream your recording or what have you now if you are using mage block capture cards their own driver software actually will give you the option to manually stretch it back out to pool or squish it down to partial or whatever so regardless of your video signal it'll pretty much handle it their cards are like magic i love it but they're super expensive but these are generally the settings you should be using there's one more exception which will only apply to some people but i wanted to go ahead and mention and that is with the camera the panasonic g7 this was my go-to recommendation for a video camera for a streaming camera for a very long time because you can get them cheap under 500 most of the time sometimes even cheaper they do 4k 30. it is absolutely beautiful they do 1080p 60. but i whenever i first set this up i watched caleb pike over at dslr video shooters his guide on setting this up and he always recommended not even for live streaming purposes but for general recording purposes to go into the camera settings and set it to limited range which they read as 0 to 2 or 16 to 255 even though it's supposed to be 235 because the full range videos out of this at least at the time and last time i checked this was still true those did not work in premiere or resolve they were way too dark in contrasty and it didn't make any sense and even the same thing i have tested more recently running into my black magic capture cards i was like well those capture cards can handle the full range it's fine i open it up and then still when i import it into davinci resolve it's not great if you're not really sure what to use i would pull up some reference gameplay either on your console or through another hdmi feed that you know what it's supposed to look like the colors the contrast the levels things like that keep an eye on what it's supposed to look like and then run it through your capture card and toggle it between partial and full and see what it looks like and see which looks best to you especially if you're using some of these generic capture cards the tiny little 15 usb capture card i reviewed before doesn't seem to have a fully linear translation of color space in it and so it's not fully partial but it's not fully full either so partial is the best route with it but it's still not exactly perfect and so i would recommend just playing with it to be certain but again but what you should have taken away from this is that obs in the advanced tab should always be left on partial anyway it is only in certain circumstances in the video capture device properties for a webcam or capture card where you might set that to full but never obs itself i know this is super nerdy and focusing on a tiny little detail that a lot of people don't care to pay attention to but there are so many streams and videos out there of video especially console gameplay where it's super washed out or people need to add extra contrast and saturation and trash their footage further because it looks too washed out or it's too dark and punchy which is harder to encode because of rgb color range mismatch and i wanted to help clear the air a little bit here i hope this video has been helpful for you if it has hit the like button subscribe for more tech education and stream guides go check out our sponsored nerd or die and their new overdrive stream layout i'm opposed to oxford stream professor the one and only stream professor the guy who's been around for 10 years covering streaming topics it's crazy i'll see you next time\n"