colour space setting?

You can easily start drowning in theory if you dig into this, so here's a quick but respectable rule of thumb from this article:

"My advice is to use Adobe RGB 1998 if you normally work with 16-bit images, and sRGB if you normally work with 8-bit images."​

Here's an article from SmugMug's support site that draws a similar conclusion.

My own take: AdobeRGB is better if your most important use of your images is printing AND if you've got a calibrated monitor. If both of those conditions aren't true, you'll be better off with sRGB.

Note that if you're saving your files in raw format, you can output into either color space. I output images for online posting in sRGB, and ones that I want to edit (on my calibrated monitor) in AdobeRGB.
 
If you're aiming to produce images for output on a decent quality inkjet printer, then use Adobe RGB, as it has a bigger colour gamut than sRGB. Then process in Adobe RGB or something wide-gamut like ProPhoto RGB (Lightroom uses a colour space of similar gamut to ProPhoto) and send to printer from there.

sRGB was developed for output on computer displays only (your own desktop or the web).

So no worms, really, just horses for courses.
 
It's your call, obviously, but I'd always go for the bigger gamut option , just in case I felt the need somewhere down the line. You can always downgrade to sRGB, but you can never get back what was not captured.

Oh and season's greetings. Rude of me to overlook that previously!
 
if you capture in raw or tiff then keep that as if it were a neg, you can assign any profile you like at a later date and save, view, post or print that as often as you want, and still have the "neg" to go back to later .... all the original information will still be there in the tiff
 
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I'd always go for the bigger gamut option...
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The trouble with bigger-is-better as applied to color gamuts is that some of your "bit budget" is getting "spent" representing colors that aren't reachable, instead of colors that are reachable.

The article I cited in my earlier post has a diagram showing this (in the "Influence on Bit Depth Distribution" section, about halfway down.)

That's not a problem when working with 16-bit-color files, since there are plenty of bits to spare. But in 8-bit color, this can result in problems such as banding and less-smooth color gradation. Since 8-bit color is the norm for displays and even for most printer drivers, this is an issue that can't just be ignored.

So yes, for your 16-bit master files, you'll want to choose a color space with as wide a gamut as possible, such as AdobeRGB (which is optimized for 4-color press printing, by the way) or ProPhoto RGB (which is optimized for photographic printing.)

For files you'll reduce to 8 bits, you have to do a bit of thinking about where they're going. I spend every workday making decisions of this sort, and I pick sRGB if I'm sending the file into a non-color-managed environment (office users) or AdobeRGB if I'm sending it into a color-managed environment (professional graphics users.)

See, I warned you we could wind up drowning in theory...
 
jlw said:
The trouble with bigger-is-better as applied to color gamuts is that some of your "bit budget" is getting "spent" representing colors that aren't reachable, instead of colors that are reachable.

The article I cited in my earlier post has a diagram showing this (in the "Influence on Bit Depth Distribution" section, about halfway down.)

That's not a problem when working with 16-bit-color files, since there are plenty of bits to spare. But in 8-bit color, this can result in problems such as banding and less-smooth color gradation. Since 8-bit color is the norm for displays and even for most printer drivers, this is an issue that can't just be ignored.

So yes, for your 16-bit master files, you'll want to choose a color space with as wide a gamut as possible, such as AdobeRGB (which is optimized for 4-color press printing, by the way) or ProPhoto RGB (which is optimized for photographic printing.)

For files you'll reduce to 8 bits, you have to do a bit of thinking about where they're going. I spend every workday making decisions of this sort, and I pick sRGB if I'm sending the file into a non-color-managed environment (office users) or AdobeRGB if I'm sending it into a color-managed environment (professional graphics users.)

See, I warned you we could wind up drowning in theory...
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Yep ... part of my day job too

PS joe, the gamut on your mac will be 1.8 i expect, the rd1 will probably be the windows default of 2 ... that's probably not helpful is it?
 
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well, the majority of my photos go to and are viewed over at flickr. some of them go to my lab and are printed (usually 8x10) and then framed and hung.
if the printed ones could be 'improved' by using adobe rgb then i would think that would be the wiser route.
of course, the majority of the images are converted to black and white somewhere along the road so this may all be a moot point.
 
Sparrow said:
Yep ... part of my day job too

PS joe, the gamut on your mac will be 1.8 i expect, the rd1 will probably be the windows default of 2 ... that's probably not helpful is it?
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Since we're both graphic-arts professionals, I know you meant to write "gamma," not "gamut" -- but we don't want to confuse the munchkins, do we?

That's another good point, although it's a separate issue from color profiling: the gamma (slope of the midpoint of the contrast curve) of Mac monitors defaults to 1.8, while the default gamma for Windows PCs is 2.2. The result is that a file that has ideal tone separation when viewed on your Mac monitor may look "plugged" when viewed on a PC monitor. This is especially important with black-and-white, where distribution of tones is critical to the aesthetics of the image.

Fortunately, it's easy -- using your Mac's Displays pref pane -- to make another display profile set to 2.2 gamma, and use that when you're tweaking files that will be viewed online.

The shake-out is that if you have no idea where your files will be viewed (as is the case when posting online) it's a good idea to optimize them for an sRGB color space and a gamma of 2.2. That's sort of the lowest common denominator, or worst-case scenario.

If you do know the environment in which they'll be viewed, you can optimize them for that specific environment. For example, many online labs have custom printer profiles that you can download.

Again, this all shows the value of shooting your files as raw and saving them in a 16-bit format; you can render out copies optimized for various environments without throwing away any data from your originals.
 
So I'd say you're in good shape. Your images presumably look the way you want on Flickr, where sRGB/2.2 is the norm, and your lab prints turn out the way you want them to (probably because their printers assume sRGB/2.2 by default, as most do) so you're golden. Don't touch anything!
 
That depends on what your workflow looks like. If you get 16-bit files from the camera, process them in Photoshop, convert them to 8 bit, and then print those 8-bit files, then Adobe RGB is fine - the only caveat is that you should switch the colour space to sRGB when saving your 8-bit files. If you get JPEGs from the camera, which are 8-bit, then sRGB may be the better option.

In general, unless you have problems with how colours are being represented, you can stick to sRGB for the beginning.
 
When I print, I ALWAYS use a specific monitor at my home office and ALWAYS print to a specific printer at my local Costco. I downloaded the Photoshop ICC profile from drycreek.com for that specific printer. SO, now, what I see on my monitor is EXACTLY what I see on my prints.

If you have a local Costco and use Photoshop, I highly recommend downloading the ICC profile from drycreek.com
 
jlw said:
Since we're both graphic-arts professionals, I know you meant to write "gamma," not "gamut" -- but we don't want to confuse the munchkins, do we?

That's another good point, although it's a separate issue from color profiling: the gamma (slope of the midpoint of the contrast curve) of Mac monitors defaults to 1.8, while the default gamma for Windows PCs is 2.2. The result is that a file that has ideal tone separation when viewed on your Mac monitor may look "plugged" when viewed on a PC monitor. This is especially important with black-and-white, where distribution of tones is critical to the aesthetics of the image.

"EDIT for brevity"
Click to expand...

Sorry, I was trying to type and cook with wine at the time; I put little of the wine in the food clearly
 
I never really understood the big hassle about color space to use.

It really is very simple:
If you are into quality, juice out the best of your work flow, maintain a well sorted chain of processing with your computer, screen, color calibration, printers, PP software,… just start with the best record by using Adobe RGB (the widest color gamut, the R-D1 allows) and trickle down in your processing from there.

If you're the spontaneous type and want to worry less about all the stuff above, just shoot in sRBG and don't waste a thought on this topic again.

I have it sorted easy and shoot all digitals in Adobe RGB, import into Lightroom and export in a colorspace, needed from there (for web, mail and friends generally sRGB, the rest in Adobe RGB).
 
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