For instance, an image from a standard digital camera will have a red, green and blue channel.
Three main channel types (or color models) exist, and have respective strengths and weaknesses.
RGB channels roughly follow the color receptors in the human eye, and are used in computer displays and image scanners.
YUV images are an affine transformation of the RGB colorspace, originated in broadcasting.
A CMYK image has four channels: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black).
A 32-bit CMYK image (the industry standard as of 2005) is made of four 8-bit channels, one for cyan, one for magenta, one for yellow, and one for key color (typically is black).
HSV is especially useful in lossy video compression, where loss of color information is less noticeable to the human eye.
[citation needed] Among other techniques, lossy video compression uses chroma subsampling to reduce the bit depth in color channels (hue and saturation), while keeping all brightness information (value in HSV).