Colourspace - reason for Adobe / Prophoto RGB VS sRGB

[Mike Dos Santos]

Hi All,

I have been doing some research on colourspaces to work in both Lightroom and Photoshop due to a problem I am currently having.

I know the merits of the wider gamut / colours of AdobeRGB and Prophoto RGB, but is there any merit working in these colourspaces if I dont have a wide gamut monitor? Or that 90% of the people who view my photo's dont have access to these top range wide gamut monitors?

My thinking is that maybe I should just work in sRGB as my work is viewed on screen and on my website 99% and I don't do much printing?

Also, by editing in these wide gamut colourspaces, and then converting to sRGB, won't that then change the appearance of some of the photos once I have converted, and thus the end result will not look as I wanted when editing?

Thanks for the help!!!

[SteveG]

not gonna try and solve all your issues in one post, I'm just gonna offer some info to help you in your research:

In Lightroom you are working in ProPhoto. Can't help it, it's fixed, not an option.
In ACR the histogram is based on your selected output space, helping you visualize what you are going to lose if you export from Raw to sRGB, for example.

The main advantage of the wide gamut spaces is that you are not throwing away data - you probably already know this. It sucks not being able to see all the extra colour onscreen, if you have a narrow gamut monitor, but I've found I can still process succesfully working on an sRGB-gamut monitor. When I'm processing for print it's EASIER to work with a wide gamut monitor, but not essential. Basically you can keep all the data and still get a good result.

If you know that all you are ever going to do is process for web and onscreen, and that print is not a priority then working in sRGB will give you a slight advantage. More predictability, but not much more. The only drawback I can think of is if you decide a year or so later that you want to print some of your images as well as you possibly can you are going to have to go back and re-process the Raws into a wider gamut space. Lost time, not much else.

Some photos will change when converting from Prophoto to sRGB. You lose saturation in the out of gamut colours. Of course a narrow gamut monitor won't show this. I see it all the time with my shots of flowers and artworks when I'm working on my wide-gamut screen. Bright, saturated colours can lose a lot of pop when I convert them to sRGB for web/email.

A bit point form, but I hope I've been useful. :-)

[Mike Dos Santos]

In Lightroom you are working in ProPhoto. Can't help it, it's fixed, not an option.

Fantastic, thanks Steve! You pretty much summed up what I am experiencing in 1 sentence!!!

On the web all research with problems pointed to export settings which was not what I was experiencing!

As for the printing difference in using the different colour setting, I agree that you are spot on! Might just use sRGB for now, and if I note that I am printing more in future will definately use your advice! Thanks

[EttVenter]

Forgive my ignorance, but my understanding is that if your file is a RAW file, then colour space is still irrelevant. It's once you export that file into an image format that it starts to matter. So in lightroom, you're not using a specific colourspace (if you shoot in RAW), your image has no colour space restrictions. Once you drop that file into a TIFF/JPEG/Whatever, you choose what colourspace you want it to be exported to.

It's for this same reason that it doesn't matter what colour space you set your camera to shoot in. Whether you tell it to shoot in Adobe or sRGB, it'll still get the full colour, because you're shooting in RAW.

I speak under correction, though. I'm pretty sure that what I've said is accurate, but if you can link me to something proving otherwise, I'll happily shut my mouth :P

[Forgiss - Sean Nel]

yes and no...

sRGB is for most electronic mediums that mostly run in an 6-8bit colourspace in any case. It also depends on what you shoot.

Wifey prefers to do all in Adobe RGB because she can get a more neutral skintone out of her models, so during post, it's good for her. Final touch is the convert and save to sRGB (although, most browsers are fine with RGB nowadays) for web presentation

[Mike Dos Santos]

Ett, you may be correct, but Lightroom applies its default preset to what it thinks your RAW file should look like, and once it does this it starts to change appearance of the file. I think this is where my problem was coming from. As Steve mentioned, I think the fact that it is working in Prophoto may be causing the difference as I export to Photoshop in sRGB to better predict what my image will look like when posting online.

[Mike Dos Santos]

Thanks Sean!

[SteveG]

Forgive my ignorance, but my understanding is that if your file is a RAW file, then colour space is still irrelevant. It's once you export that file into an image format that it starts to matter. So in lightroom, you're not using a specific colourspace (if you shoot in RAW), your image has no colour space restrictions. Once you drop that file into a TIFF/JPEG/Whatever, you choose what colourspace you want it to be exported to.

While it is still a Raw file then it has no colour space. As soon as you view it on screen then your Raw software is converting it to an RGB image SO THAT YOU CAN see it. What you are seeing and working on in Lightroom is an RGB tiff, held in memory, in a variant of the ProPhotoRGB working space.

It's for this same reason that it doesn't matter what colour space you set your camera to shoot in. Whether you tell it to shoot in Adobe or sRGB, it'll still get the full colour, because you're shooting in RAW.

It's true that the colour space setting in the camera does no affect the content of the Raw file. It DOES affect the calculation of the review histogram, however!

I speak under correction, though. I'm pretty sure that what I've said is accurate, but if you can link me to something proving otherwise, I'll happily shut my mouth :P

I'm also pretty sure what I say is accurate, but please don't just believe me: read, read and read some more. Check my 'facts'

[SteveG]

Ett, you may be correct, but Lightroom applies its default preset to what it thinks your RAW file should look like, and once it does this it starts to change appearance of the file. I think this is where my problem was coming from. As Steve mentioned, I think the fact that it is working in Prophoto may be causing the difference as I export to Photoshop in sRGB to better predict what my image will look like when posting online.

If you have a narrow (similar to sRGB) gamut monitor then what you are seeing in Lightroom is going to be very similar to what you see in PS when you open a ProPhoto file and convert it to sRGB. Your image in LR is already being converted, for display, to a space similar to sRGB.

Try processing in ACR and play with the export spaces - you'll be able to see what happens to the histogram when you switch between them. sRGB clips colours much sooner than Adobe or Prophoto.