sRGB vs AdobeRGB

[marcos]

I attended a Digital Workflow seminar yesterday, an event sponsored by FujiFilm. Apart from pushing their products (as logical), it was great.
One of the most interesting topics, was the use sRGB and AdobeRGB color space. From reading this forums, I get that sRGB is for web use, and the rest AdobeRGB (remember, I'm just learning about digital photography) with ProPhoto 16 bit when editing.
As demonstrated by Will Crocket, seasoned film and digital photographer for long time, he uses sRGB all the time and AdobeRGB only when shooting for offset commercial printing or printing to an inkjet run by software rip, he never uses inkjet without it, factory inkjet drivers is not a way of obtaining true color out of digital cameras. Also explained color space of some devices, specially the FujiFilm Frontier minilab, used by the majority of photolabs. The gamut of those machines is even smaller than the sRGB color space, so using anything else is cause of color shift, specially the red or pink cast when AdobeRGB is assigned to jpgs or tiffs,
"don't even worry about 16bit images when sending to a photolab, waste of space and time", he said.
One more detail I learned, when calibrating monitor, use D65 as the white point and 2.2 for gamma, mac or pc, those are the settings used by professional digital photographers, a little warmer but your eyes would compensate and look at it as white (closest to sunlight) after a while, trust me, it works!, that info gets transfered with the monitor profile when printing in sRGB color space, because a well calibrated screen and printer will match.
All this might be old news to some around here, but thought about sharing what I learned.

[oli]

New to me. Thanks for the info.

An interesting article relating to this can be found here:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutor ... -rgb.shtml

Personally I used to use AdobeRGB the whole way through processing, till I realised I was wasting a lot of time... My images are mainly for the web so I began to do everything in sRGB and only process my RAW files in AdobeRGB if I intended on printing them.

Funnily enough the first set of TIFFs I took into Campus Colour here in Adelaide had to be converted back to sRGB there anyway - that's what they use and it's the profile they told me to bring my images in with.

So now everything is in sRGB here...

[Matt. K]

There are 2 schools of thought on this subject. Bottom line is...your monitor and your printer work only in sRGB colour space. I have not yet met the photographer who can look at a print and correctly identify those captured in RGB or sRGB. My advice is to work in sRGB unless you can convince yourself, by printing and testing, that RGB offers a better print.

Now I'm gonna sit back and wait for the flack!

[PiroStitch]

Matt, believe it or not, I've noticed a bit of difference but very subtle when using RGB in camera to sRGB on screen and printing.

Either that or I'm imagining it because I want to see a difference to justify my wackiness

[krpolak]

There might be small difference between aRGB and sRGB as well as 8 or 16 bit, when photo is exposed correctly, everybody is happy with that, print out, on a printer or in lab (after converting to their profile - dont count on lab guy). Ens of story.

Problem starts to appear when ie:

1. Scene has a huge contrast and is shot for correct highlight exposure with intention to compensate it with levels (because for some reasn we dont or cannot bracket)

2. Scene has subtle, but extensive gradients

3. Photo is just an input for further post production, montage etc

Then extra bits and larger colour space start to count.

I prefer to have this extra bit of flexibility.

Regards,

K.Polak