Color spaces are essential in photography; they apply in some way to every photo you take. The most well-known color spaces are sRGB, Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto RGB. But what makes them so important? Beware: There’s a lot of misinformation about this topic online. Outdated and inaccurate recommendations abound – but so does a lot of valuable information, if you’re willing to learn it. This article introduces sRGB, Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto RGB, and when to use each one.
I’ll preface this article, like most technical articles I write, by saying that this is a complex subject! You might want to dig down and read it a couple times to fully internalize how everything works. I did my best to write it all in plain English, as well as define complex terms in context, so hopefully it’s still easy to understand. You’re also free to ask questions in the comments section at the end, and I’m happy to help clarify anything you’re still wondering about.
Table of Contents
1. What Are sRGB, Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto RGB?
sRGB, Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto RGB are three of the most commonly used color spaces in photography.
“Color spaces” is not some fancy term meant to confuse or bewilder. It just means a set of colors – a container, almost. If you have two paints (say, red and blue) plus a white canvas, your entire color space is just the colors you can make by mixing the two paints. And yes, that includes painting more lightly to let some of the white canvas shine through.
A good way to envision color spaces is to look at a set of all the colors people can see. (If no one can see it, it’s not a “color” anyway – colors are subjective like that.) You may have seen an illustration like this before:
The diagram above represents every color we can see, although note that it’s a two dimensional figure (x and y axis only), so it doesn’t account for darker colors, i.e., luminance.
So, how do sRGB, Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto RGB fit into this? Quite simply, they intersect with the diagram above (and, in the case of ProPhoto, actually stretch beyond it in places). Here are the different shapes of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto color spaces. If you’re first learning about these three color spaces, the simple diagrams below might answer some of your questions already:
And here’s how they all look overlaid together:
As you can see, sRGB is the smallest color space, with a gamut (another word for range) only covering a small portion of what our own eyes can see. The Adobe RGB gamut is larger, particularly in the green and cyan colors. It allows for more saturation (“chroma”) in those areas.
ProPhoto RGB is the largest of the three – and possibly the most interesting, since it includes “colors” outside what we can see. We call these imaginary colors just to induce fear in other photographers. You physically cannot see them; that’s what makes them imaginary. They aren’t especially important to this discussion, though. ProPhoto RGB only includes those values because it allows the gamut of real colors to be larger than that of other color spaces, including sRGB and Adobe RGB.
Remember, too, that these are just 2D representations. Here’s a 3D image of the sRGB color space (viewed from slightly overhead), so you can visualize the role that luminance plays:
2. Understanding RGB Values
Let’s say that you want to specify a particular color, maybe a slight shade of beige-white. Color spaces are defined mathematically. Every color you could possibly think of has, essentially, its own “coordinates” within the color space so you can find it exactly. But keep in mind that these coordinates are specific to each color space. The same values won’t result in the same color in both sRGB and Adobe RGB, for example.
“RGB” stands for red, green, blue. This is what specifies the color you’re looking for – three values, one each for red, green, and blue. In sRGB color space, the beige-white color in question is specified as RGB 255, 248, 231 – meaning that the red channel value is 255, green is 248, and blue is 231.
But “255, 248, 231” points to a different color in Adobe RGB space, as well as in ProPhoto RGB space. That is very important to know; it’s why your photos need to include information about their color space. Otherwise, how can a computer application know what color you mean by “255, 248, 231”? It simply can’t tell.
Spoiler alert: Despite how important it is, some applications don’t read the color space of a photo. They just assume you’re using a default color space (more on that later). This is a problem for hopefully obvious reasons. You don’t want your browser or application to see the RGB coordinates “120, 140, 160” in both sRGB and ProPhoto color spaces and think they’re the same color.
3. Understanding Bit Depth
Another important topic to this discussion is bit depth, also known as color depth – simply how many bits of data are used to create each pixel.
The baseline in photography is usually 8 bits per pixel, meaning that each individual pixel can represent 2^8 or 256 colors. But your camera has red, green, and blue pixels. So that’s 256 shades of red, 256 shades of green, and 256 shades of blue. The total is 256 x 256 x 256, or a whopping 16,777,216 RGB values.
But why stop there? It’s common to work with photos up to 16 bit per channel, leading to an incredible 281 trillion RGB values at your disposal. Although this may seem absurd and unnecessary – it’s far more than the human visual system can perceive – there are benefits to using 16-bit color while you’re editing a photo. Specifically, it makes gradients in an image as smooth as possible, with minimal banding.
(Note that calling all of these 281 trillion RGB points “colors” is a bit misleading, since color is defined based on human perception. Sure, there are trillions of “color codes,” but many of them are too similar for us to notice a difference. And recall that some of ProPhoto’s color codes refer to imaginary colors anyway – ones we cannot see.)
3.1. Do Photos in Large Color Spaces Have More Colors than Others?
One major confusion I often see is the idea that photos in large color spaces like ProPhoto have “more colors” than others.
No! The color space of a photo says nothing about total number of colors in an image. ProPhoto RGB may be “bigger” in terms of range, but an image in ProPhoto RGB color space doesn’t have more colors than a photo in sRGB. An 8-bit per channel photo is limited to about 16.8 million RGB values, no matter what color space it’s in. Those values are simply spread out farther in color spaces like ProPhoto – potentially leading to a problem known as banding.
3.2. Bit Depth and Banding
The larger your color space, the more important it is that you work with higher bit depth photos. In sRGB, using 8-bit per channel color will often result in smooth gradients that are just fine, with no perceptible banding. But those same 16.8 million colors in ProPhoto will be by definition farther apart from one another, since they’re spreading out to fill a bigger “container.” This makes it more likely that you’ll see banding in gradients in your photos.
You can work around this easily by avoiding 8-bit color with ProPhoto images.
4. Working Space vs Output Space
There are two stages along the photo pipeline where you need to choose a color space: post-processing and outputting your image.
Okay, if you shoot JPEG (don’t), you also have to make this decision in camera, at least with some cameras (which have sRGB and Adobe RGB options). RAW shooters can ignore this menu option if they want. It will change the preview on the rear of your camera screen, so I recommend picking Adobe RGB, but it doesn’t alter the RAW data you capture.
Below, I’ll narrow down the importance of picking the right color space for both post-processing and output.
4.1. Working Space
When you post-process a photo, you have to choose which working space you’re in. This is the color space your post-processing software restricts you to use; no edit you make can lead to a color found outside your chosen working space. In general, it is ideal that your working space is ProPhoto RGB when you edit a RAW photo. That’s because RAW photos often contain colors outside of both sRGB and Adobe RGB color spaces, especially in high-saturation shadow regions. If you specify sRGB as your working space, you’ll automatically clip any colors that fall outside the sRGB range for every photo you edit. (Some software, like Lightroom, doesn’t even let you specify sRGB as your working space for this reason.)
Photoshop’s ideal settings are a bit tricky, and there are a few different philosophies on the best practices. But if you’re unsure, just set Edit > Color Settings > RGB > Preserve Embedded Profiles. That way, any ProPhoto images you open from Lightroom, Adobe Camera RAW, etc., remain in ProPhoto. And be sure to enable the checkboxes below so you know about any mismatches when they appear. (Another possibility is to select RGB working space to ProPhoto and “Convert to working RGB” so all your Photoshop documents are ProPhoto, for the same result in most cases.)
This is critical! A lot of photographers use software like Adobe Camera RAW or Lightroom for many of their important edits, then open the image in Photoshop. But they may have their export settings create images in sRGB or Adobe RGB working space, not realizing that this clips colors beyond it. Instead, click on the blue link at the bottom of Camera RAW and change the images to ProPhoto, 16-bit. In Lightroom, go to Lightroom > External Editing > File Format TIFF, Color Space ProPhoto, Bit Depth 16.
Equally critical! If you just realized that you’ve been using sRGB or AdobeRGB for Camera RAW’s or Lightroom’s export settings, and you’re rushing to change it to ProPhoto, hang on for just a minute. You’re about to do something useful – you’re avoiding clipping colors outside the sRGB space for no reason – but it comes with some responsibility. You now have an extra step when exporting images from Photoshop to the web: converting them to sRGB. That’s easy to do with Edit > Convert to Profile > sRGB. Converting to sRGB for web images is essential; don’t let a ProPhoto image loose on the world.
4.2 Output Space
Output space is merely the color space chosen for your final photo. The ideal color space depends on your output medium, but each one – sRGB, Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto – has its uses.
For the web, sRGB is generally ideal (more on that in the next section). To send files for other photographers to edit, perhaps ProPhoto is preferable. And for printing, converting directly from a large working space (ProPhoto) to the printer’s specific color space is ideal.
Some specific third parties may request photos in sRGB, Adobe RGB, or occasionally ProPhoto. For example, some (low-end) print labs won’t accept photos in any color space other than sRGB or perhaps Adobe RGB. In that case, send what they request, or ideally switch to a different lab.
5. When Should You sRGB, Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto RGB?
This is the bottom line – the best times to use each color space. Each of sRGB, Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto RGB has its uses, but you need to know when each one is ideal:
5.1. sRGB
sRGB is often touted as the “default” color space – the easiest to understand, the lowest common denominator. Beginning photographers are told, often by some loud voices in the photography world, to do everything in sRGB. That’s reasonable advice for exporting to the web or to clients, but potentially a very bad idea when talking about working space.
First, it’s true that you generally should export photos to the web or clients in sRGB. That’s because of two things: computer monitors and non-color-managed applications.
Remember when I said that non-color-managed applications don’t read the profile assigned to an image? They just pick a default color profile. If you guessed that this “default” was usually sRGB, you’d be wrong – but not far off. Instead, most non-color-managed applications use your monitor’s color space to map the RGB coordinates of a photo. Crazy, right? Not that there’s anything too weird about your monitor having a color space; it’s just the colors your monitor can display.
But here’s the important point: Most non-photographers use monitors with color spaces similar to sRGB color space. That means sRGB files will look the “least bad” when they’re interpreted with a non-color-managed application. By comparison, if you look at a ProPhoto image on a non-color-managed application (like an old web browser) with one of these monitors, it will look very dull and low in contrast. So, for web and client photos, export in sRGB.
Lastly, don’t use sRGB as your working space for editing photos, or you’ll clip colors for no good reason. But at the same time, be certain to convert photos to sRGB for exporting to the web! You’ll need to add that step to your workflow if you haven’t already. Again, don’t let an Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB image escape into the wild.
5.2. ProPhoto RGB
I skipped Adobe RGB for the moment to talk about ProPhoto RGB, the ideal working space to use in most cases.
Note that I said working space – not output space. There’s a reason why Lightroom uses a cousin of ProPhoto RGB for editing images. When you edit an image in ProPhoto, you minimize the risk of clipping colors unnecessarily. And you can still export the photo in a smaller color space, so why worry?
At the same time, be very careful not to publish or send off a ProPhoto image. It’s easy to accidentally save an image from Photoshop in ProPhoto RGB if that’s your working space. If anyone views the resulting file in a non-color-managed application, the colors will look strange and likely quite dull.
This is why, if you have clients, one of the worst mistakes you can make is to give them a set of ProPhoto RGB images. Why? Because sooner or later, they’ll open the images on some old photo viewing program without color management, and they’ll think you totally ruined their wedding/event/portrait session. The same is true of Adobe RGB, too, although the colors won’t look quite as bad in that case on most monitors. This is why you export in sRGB!
5.3. Adobe RGB
Adobe RGB is a bit of the odd one out.
This color space doesn’t resemble that of most consumer screens, like sRGB does, making it a poor choice for export to the web. It also isn’t as large as ProPhoto, minimizing its utility as a working space. I’m tempted to say that you should avoid it entirely – and, indeed, sRGB and ProPhoto RGB are more useful overall – but there are still some cases when Adobe RGB is ideal.
First, if you buy a wide-gamut monitor, it will mimic Adobe RGB more closely than sRGB. In that case, for personal use on any non-color-managed applications, Adobe RGB will look noticeably better than sRGB (which will be oversaturated by comparison).
Second, if you print your photos and have a wide-gamut monitor, Adobe RGB can be useful in certain cases. It’s the best way to get your print to match the image on your screen – not always as ideal as it sounds, but nonetheless the goal of some photographers. I’ll touch on that in the next section.
Lastly, some clients and companies specifically request Adobe RGB images. In certain cases, they may have a good reason, while in other cases, they may just be confused. If you’re doing work for a company that already has a system in place, and they request Adobe RGB, just go with it. The same is true for certain print houses that request solely sRGB or Adobe RGB files. It might not be a high-end printing house, but you should follow their request or risk getting a bad print.
6. Printing Photos
It would take several articles to cover the nuances of color when printing photos, so this article will only touch on some brief recommendations:
6.1. The Two Printing Methods
If you’re not well-practiced at printing, the best thing to do is simple: Send your images off to a lab of your choice, without any extra photo edits or corrections, and pick their “color correction” option if they have one. Do so with sRGB files. This is the easiest way to get painless prints that look good and match your screen as much as possible.
For advanced printing needs, you’ll have to decide between printing at home or sending off to a higher-end lab (one that lets you do the corrections yourself). If you’re sending off to a lab, download their ICC profile for the ink/paper you’re using. Soft proof the photo in something like Adobe Lightroom, and make edits to exactly how the print will look. Export the image in ProPhoto (usually), then convert to the printer’s ICC profile. Send it off to the lab and specify no color corrections. For self-printing, do the same thing, just using the print module in Photoshop or similar. It’s worth mentioning that unless you have some practice here, the result has a good chance of looking worse than the prior method.
There certainly are printing methods in between, like sending photos to a high-end lab in ProPhoto space for them to color correct. But these are the two extreme ends of the spectrum.
6.2. Should Your Print Match Your Screen?
There’s a big reason why I said you should “usually” convert directly from ProPhoto to the printer’s ICC profile – and it gets down to the whole essence of this topic in the first place. No matter how good your display is, there are colors in ProPhoto that your monitor will not show. This means that when you’re editing in ProPhoto working space, you are editing colors that you can’t actually see on screen.
Don’t panic; this sounds scarier than it is. In real-world photography, it usually just means that saturated shadows have more detail and nuance than your monitor – or any monitor – physically can display. If you want that detail and nuance to show up in a print, follow the steps above.
But if you’re a stickler for the print matching the screen, this obviously won’t work. Instead, convert the photo from your working space of ProPhoto to the color space that resembles your monitor – Adobe RGB if you’re using a wide gamut monitor, and sRGB if you’re using a typical monitor. Make minor adjustments if needed, then print. You’ll get a print that more closely matches the screen – but at the expense of clipping away detail that your printer potentially can print.
No printer can encapsulate all of ProPhoto RGB’s real colors, nor those of Adobe RGB or even sRGB. But almost every photo printer on the market can print some colors outside the sRGB gamut, and even outside the Adobe RGB gamut. (Don’t believe me? Compare the gamuts of your printer’s ICC profile versus sRGB color space, making sure to look at 3D illustrations rather than 2D.)
The colors outside sRGB and Adobe RGB, but within your printer’s gamut, are the ones you’re after. They’re likely to look the best and most nuanced when you convert directly from ProPhoto working space to your printer’s ICC profile, then print.
7. What About Monitor Calibration and Profiling?
I almost forgot the one color topic that photographers know the most about: the importance of calibrating and profiling your computer’s display.
Although profiling your monitor is a bit removed from the theme of this article, it’s worth mentioning because it really is an important part of post-processing. Of course, if you’ve read about monitor calibration before, you’ll already know that every viewer with an uncalibrated monitor will see your photos differently anyway. But calibration and profiling are still important in order to get your print to match your screen as much as possible – and to get (relatively) consistent images among other photographers looking at your work.
Calibration and color profiles also apply to printers. However, not nearly as many photographers create custom profiles for those as for their monitors. In part, that’s because most common ink/paper combinations come with an ICC profile already (easy to find online if you don’t already have it), so creating a custom profile is more a case of fine-tuning. Still, if you’re willing, it can be better to see exactly how your own printer performs with a given combination of ink and paper rather than accepting the manufacturer’s profile. But that’s a topic for another day.
8. Conclusion
You made it, and that’s impressive – this is one of the lesser-understood topics in photography, despite its importance. Many photographers have no idea when to use sRGB, Adobe RGB, or ProPhoto RGB. Now you do! That should help you avoid two of the cardinal sins of color spaces: clipping colors unnecessarily, and publishing photos with the wrong color space.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to add them below. I’ll do my best to help out if anyone is confused on this topic. Also check out the tutorials on Andrew Rodney’s website for more in-depth information about digital color in general.
Hi Spencer,
I am trying to find the best of both worlds for selling prints. I am going to buy an Eizo CG2730 monitor.
The idea is to use an online photo site like SmugMug, etc. for selling the images. I want to create the best possible editing for the print lab and use their icc profile for consistent prints. I would like the image seen by customers to be sRGB for better online viewing. I am afraid if they see the file for the printer they may not want to buy it because they do not know the print image will look different.
From what I understand these services only allow you to upload one version of a file and it is used both for viewing online and printing.
The only option I can think of is having a site for viewing and selling prints using an sRGB image and then manually submitting them to a lab for printing using the version with the icc profile.
I realize the two may not look exactly alike and may need a disclaimer about this on the site.
What is your suggestion on how to accomplish this?
Thanks!
Spencer,
I take all my photos in camera RAW. I edit them all in Lightroom or Photoshop in ProPhotoRGB colorspace. I have calibrated my wide gamut monitor. I have been exporting files in ProPhotoRGB to a file and then printing them on my Epson SC P800 directly from the file, not directly from Lightroom or Photoshop. When I print from the file it doesn’t let me choose the ICC profile. However, I have been getting satisfactory results printing the file “as-exported”. I have also tried exporting to a file using ICC profiles and printing from the file, but it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. I certainly don’t understand why it doesn’t.
I recently purchased some Epson Legacy Platine paper and downloaded the ICC profile. I tried printing directly from Lightroom and Photoshop on three different types of paper and the colors really popped, but they were too saturated, or ended up too orange or too blue depending on the image. So I proofed the images in Lightroom specifically for the Legacy Platine, desaturated the out-of-gamut colors and reprinted, which lessened the problem, but that did not completely resolve the issue.
So then I went back to printing directly from Lightroom in ProPhotoRGB and the results were horrible. That never happened before. I’m thinking that something got screwed up in the printer (like let the printer manage the colors) so, frustrated, I turned it off, closed Lightroom, and am writing these comments.
In theory printing with the ICC profile for the Legacy Platine should give me pretty accurate results but it doesn’t. I get the same over saturated result no matter what paper I print on with the ICC profile. What the heck is going on?
Pete is making a good point here and I was about to write more or less the same. You talk about how great ProPhoto is but you miss one point: the process of color separation. You just say: ok, for web you should export in sRGB and you will be fine. No! It is not that easy. It is right that most monitors are able to show sRGB (more or less any monitor nowadays will show you 100% of sRGB) but an important factor is: how accurate will they reproduce the original picture (the one that you retouched and saw on your monitor)? This is why, imho, you should never convert any picture into ProPhoto. Let me explain why: when you later convert your picture (and you will have to as you explained really well with some examples) into another color space which is, of course, smaller, the bigger the difference between these two color spaces the worse the final result. You will always have a more accurate image if you convert from Adobe RGB to sRGB. You think you can use more colors (or let´s say chroma) to elaborate your RAW when you use ProPhoto and therefore lose less “informations”? Use 16bit and you will have more color channels to work with.
Rendering intent is a thing that you never touched here and it is the most important point when it comes to converting profiles and separation of colors. Try to use a ProPhoto profile and convert it to CMYK. You will cry like a baby if you see the prints on a newspaper (compared to the ones you saw on your screen). Obviously, I know, it is CMYK and you loose some bright colors anyway when converting from an RGB profile. But the process of separation (using any rendering intent you want, from perceptual to relative colorimetric and so on) will change your picture a lot more if you used ProPhoto rather than AdobeRGB and converting to CMYK.
Uh, what about rounding errors when going straight from one color space to another? I guess that’s not something you factored in huh?
Also, if your monitor cant really see more than sRGB or aRGB, then what’s the point in using a larger color space? It really doesn’t make sense to do this.
Pete, what exactly do you mean by rounding errors? If you explain what you’re referring to I’d be happy to answer your question.
To answer the other question of yours, I recommend reading the article again. I wrote about a few different reasons why ProPhoto is a superior working space throughout the article. For example: “Almost every photo printer on the market can print some colors outside the sRGB gamut, and even outside the Adobe RGB gamut. (Don’t believe me? Compare the gamuts of your printer’s ICC profile versus sRGB color space, making sure to look at 3D illustrations rather than 2D.)”
Another reason is to avoid clipping colors: “If you specify sRGB [note: or Adobe RGB] as your working space, you’ll automatically clip any colors that fall outside the sRGB range for every photo you edit.” A downside there is that heavy post-processing can lead to flat colors in certain areas, especially higher saturation shadow regions.
Plus, if you use software like Lightroom, it’s a non-issue because you’re already in a variant of ProPhoto RGB when you edit any photo, and there’s no way to change that.
Your reference to the monitor itself is all but a non-issue. Even if my monitor was the cheapest, crappiest CRT monitor from the early 2000s, I would still be glad that Lightroom was using a variant of ProPhoto as my working space.
Rounding errors, or partly what you refer to as clipping colors, is going to happen anyway! You can’t push non sRGB colors in to the sRGB spectrum no matter how hard you try… This means you’re going to get clipping or inaccurate colors by jumping from one color space to another anyway. Why is this? Because the colors are still going to be confined to a 255, 255, 255 palette.
Now granted, rounding errors are more likely to be present when trying to go directly from CMYK to RGB, but it doesn’t mean they’re impossible in RGB color spaces. They occur when something you’re trying to represent in one color space doesn’t exist in the one you’re going to, so a different color is substituted for the missing color, or that color is simply just clipped.
THIS THREAD WILL NEVER DIE! :o)
It’s definitely getting crazy at this point!
Thank you Spencer for a great article and also everyone contributing to this very interesting and important content.
Here is the ramble:
If choosing Color Settings of PS (+Bridge and other Adobe CC apps) to match the ProPhoto RGB color space of LightRoom, should the monitors Display Profile also be set to ProPhoto RGB?
When I do this everything on my screen UI looks odd, dull and very dark, except from the images view in LR, PS and ID they might not take as big a hit, but when choosing Adobe RGB for my monitors Display Profile everything looks much better and “true toned”.
Though when making absolute primary colors of both RGB and CMYK everything looks somewhat similar, but CMYK colors reaks death in the ProPhoto RGB display profile.
If the Display Profile is set to Adobe RGB (which looks and feels much more natural and realistic), will i then loos all the benefits of the wider ProPhoto RGB gamut and the imaginary colors?
Will those colors outside of Adobe RGB but within ProPhoto RGB be cut off by the Adobe RGB monitor profile even if it would able to show them if set to ProPhoto RGB?
I am currently on an iMac Pro with Vega 64.
Also I experince huge banding issues when editing and using gradients and especially when converting to CMYK colorspace from both Adobe RGB and ProPhoto RGB edits.
Never seemed to a problem on my old MacBook Pro 15” Late 2012 Retina, will have to go through the tideous step by step matched testing to see if the same problems will occur.
As of this writing 2019-11-28 I have just updatedm the complete Adobe CC Suite and installed the macOS Catalina Version 10.15.1 and not sure if any bugs or dorment conflicts are due to these upgrades?
Read somewhere that OpenGL can cause rendering problems, but that topic is way too deep for me, so if anyone can explain how to test and fix in a complete basic and easy to understand language I surely would appreciate it.
Good questions. You should never set your monitor to ProPhoto. Instead, set your monitor’s color profile to the one you create when calibrating your monitor. For example, mine is called “XRITE-Calibration-Attempt1.”
If you haven’t calibrated your monitor, then you should choose either Adobe RGB or sRGB – whichever is a closer match to the gamut of your monitor.
ProPhoto RGB is ideal for image editing, but it does include many colors that monitors simply cannot display. Some of those colors (usually subtle high saturation areas in the shadows) can show up in prints. Others are beneficial because – even if you can’t display them in any way – clipping them to something like AdobeRGB or sRGB prematurely in the editing stage may shift them in a direction you don’t want when editing.
I am a year late to this poat so I may have missed the boat but:
Thank you Spencer for this article. The best I’ve seen and read in a long long time. I do have a couple of questions that comes from my lack of understanding yet.
For images to be printed, I do a soft proof on a cal monitor using that Labs ICC printer ink/paper profile, then export that image as Adobe RGB, then embed the Adobe RGB profile (as they request) and send off w no color correction.
My question here comes from your instruction under 6.1:
“Export the image in pro photo (usually), then convert to the printers ICC profile.”
Are you suggesting embed the ICC Labs profile for that ink paper?
What did you mean by convert to the printers ICC profile?
Thank you again for this in-depth article.
I sincerely appreciate and enjoy photographylife.
Sorry for the late response.
Yes – export your image from Photoshop or wherever while embedding the ICC profile for that ink and paper. It sounds bizarre, but that’s the way to do it rather than exporting to ProPhoto, Adobe RGB, sRGB, or something else.
Perhaps it makes sense in a way. You’re converting all the colors in your photo to colors the printer can print. You’re not clipping any unnecessarily, nor including any colors the printer cannot print and needs to remap.
Hi there,
Sorry for coming almost a year late to this trail of comments and apologies also if some responses to my questions are covered in earlier exchanges. I have tried to understand this matter by reading several online articles. Yours is clearly the best. But a couple of questions remain. And to make this a little more “fun” or unique: I work in Capture One Pro 12 instead of Lightroom and am probably a bit of a dinosaur in the sense that I’m interested in photo books rather than looking at my photos only on a screen.
When you distinguish high-end and low-end print services, what are your criteria? I’m still searching and have come across a pretty broad spectrum so far, reaching from Duggal Visual Solutions (all custom work, way above my budget), Shop Duggal (affordable, preferring Adobe RGB TIFF, printing on Lightjet [Digital-C] or Poli [HD], consciously not providing ICC profiles for soft-proofing since they “don’t agree with photographers on some fundamentals of color printing”), MPIX (Digital-C printing, sRGB JPEG, printing in RGB on undisclosed printer, providing one ICC profile for soft-proofing but not to be embedded), Blurb (sRGB JPEG, printing on Indigo presses in CMYK, providing one for soft-proofing that can be embedded) and Saal (sRGB JPEG, Digital C-printing in RGB, providing a series of ICC profiles for soft-proofing for various printers and papers). With the exception of Duggal Visual Solutions, these services operate around the same price points. In a nutshell, I feel a bit lost in selecting the optimal product and setting up my workflow accordingly.
I hope I’m making sense… If I do, would anybody have further thoughts or advice?
Thanks much!
If you’re in an area where Bay Photo ships, that’s my recommendation. Export your photos as sRGB TIFFs, and enable “color corrections” – no need for soft proofing, and you’ll get awesome results that match your monitor. (You can do the same but export as Adobe RGB, and the results might not totally match your monitor, but they should be close and potentially have better colors in the shadow regions.) If you want to do the advanced method at Bay Photo to get that last bit of color fidelity, that’s possible too – their ICC profiles are available for download.
I wouldn’t really trust a lab that doesn’t provide ICC profiles because they don’t agree with photographers on the fundamentals of color printing. If Bay Photo doesn’t work for you, I recommend getting one small print from all the companies you’re considering, on a similar paper. Follow the method I outlined – export as sRGB TIFFs, and enable color corrections if there is one – and see how you like the prints. I’ve heard good things about MPIX and some of the others, but honestly the only one you mentioned that I’ve used is Duggal Visual Solutions.
(It’s been ~5 1/2 months so probably no one will see this … but what the heck, I’ll give it a try)
(1) If we look at the second of the color space figures in this article, we see an inner triangle marked sRGB, representing the sRGB color space, that is, colors that can be specified in sRGB. Surrounding it is the “larger” color space representing all the colors people can see. I’m viewing the image on my computer screen, and it is provided by a web page. I’ve heard it said that the web is an sRGB world, and I believe my screen is an sRGB device. How is it, then, that the web and my screen can display colors outside the sRGB color space? How does an sRGB device display colors outside the sRGB color space (and not just a few such colors, but all of them)?
(2) I’ve seen it said that Adobe RGB is a “larger” color space than sRGB (and ProPhoto is larger still, etc.). Or that the larger spaces include more colors, and, more or less, this is why it can be beneficial to work in one of the larger spaces, and only convert to a smaller space when needed for a display device.
Related to that, the analog to digital conversion performed for a 14 bit raw file (my camera creates 14 bit raw files) records 2^14 distinct levels of color for each channel (R, G, B). Thus there are 2^14 x 2^14 x 2^14 distinct colors that can be recorded. This is a large number. However, that number doesn’t change when I change color spaces. The A-D conversion can only represent a certain number of distinct colors, and that number is defined by the number of bits and the A-D conversion process, not by the color space. Therefore it is the same for all color spaces. Thus, Adobe RBG can not represent “more” colors than sRGB. Different colors, yes, but more colors, no. Seems to me, the only way an Adobe sRGB raw image file can represent colors that aren’t in sRGB is by leaving out some of the colors in sRGB (i.e., since the total number of representable colors is fixed). Thus the smoothness of rendering gradual color changes within the sRGB space must somewhere be reduced when recording an image in Adobe RGB. In other words, it’s a trade off.
Perhaps I’ve got some misunderstanding. If so, I’d appreciate an explanation.
Excellent article and helped me a lot!
Coming from the world of film, I really don’t like PP but also all the things that can go wrong with digital photography and output for printing – it does my head in!