Color Management Made Very Simple (for Beginners and Others)

[There were several bad typos in this. Hopefully all corrected now, thanks to Jeff Schewe and Carl Weese and others. If you find something, please let me know. —Mike the Ed.]

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Life used to be simple. You had sRGB and AdobeRGB, and you tailored your workflow to one or the other depending on the final destination of your pictures. Now there's P3 and other interlopers out there.

But we'll get to that.

First, if you are unfamiliar with color space, take a gander at this diagram. I shall then 'splain.

Common color gamuts (courtesy Myndex
Research, CC by-SA 4.0)

CIE 1931 is the big color blob in the background*. It basically graphs all the colors the human eye can see. The triangles superimposed on it represent a number of standard color spaces or gamuts. The CIE, or International Commission on Illumination, founded 1913, is the international authority on light, illumination, color, and color spaces.

Now then—in most still camera menus, if you navigate to "Color" or "Color Space," you'll see you have a choice of sRGB or Adobe RGB. The simplest form of color management, and one which works surprisingly well these days, is to set your camera on sRGB, shoot JPEGs at the best JPEG setting, view your images on a computer monitor that covers 100% of the sRGB color space (so you'll be seeing all of what your camera captured as you edit your pictures), edit in sRGB, and then export your pictures for viewing to the Internet. sRGB is the cookin' color space of the Internet. If you occasionally get a print made by one of the big commercial services, such as Shutterfly, Amazon Photos (I'm an Amazon Affiliate), Mpix, Snapfish, Printique, etc., you're still doing what you should, because all or almost all of those services calibrate to sRGB whether they tell you so or not.

If you don't shoot in sRGB and save your images as JPEGs, then you probably shoot raw. Raw is good. The advantages of raw are greater headroom, for corrections in post (post-processing, that is, in the image editing program), and better dynamic range. So why do we set our cameras to Adobe RGB if we're shooting raw, given that the raw file isn't tagged with a color space? Simply because it affects some of the camera settings, such as the histogram. The histogram and certain other affected settings will more closely represent the raw file if the camera is set to Adobe RGB.

But if we're printing at home, then we take the corrected raw file and convert it into Adobe RGB (or ProPhotoRGB). Or the editing programs we use do so. And here's why that is:

Courtesy ViewSonic

CMYK, as you probably know, stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and key. "Key" means black, black being the key plate in a printing press, the plate to which the others are registered. CMYK are the basic colors used for the dots in printing presses as well as the basic colors of ink used in inkjet printers. Printer gamuts vary, but the graphs above makes it clear why we use Adobe RGB in preparation for printing. On the left we see typical printer CMYK colors overlaid on the sRGB color space, with the out-of-gamut colors filled in in black; and on the right, the same thing, but laid over the Adobe RGB color space. As this illustration makes clear, Adobe RGB can include many more of the colors available to the printer.

And that's why, if you're printing at home on a good pigment-ink printer like an Epson P900 or Canon Pro-1000, you want a monitor that's capable of showing 100% (or almost 100%) of the Adobe RGB color space. If you're only shooting for the Internet and perhaps Shutterfly et al., then sRGB is where you want to be, and that's when you can get by with a cheaper IPS monitor as long as it covers sRGB.

Color management made simple
Photography is a chain, and it's best to think of it that way. The standard term is workflow, or "the sequence of steps involved in moving from the beginning to the end of a working process" (Merriam-Webster), and I'm sure there are several words that would do as well—the "chain" means "the whole process from which camera you use to the final presentation of your image." The big advantage of specifying your own chain is that if you know where you want to end up, then you know where you have to begin, and what you need along the way.

If you conceive of a chain as a number of essential links, with each link having from two to hundreds of options, then there are many thousands of possible combinations. But let's take a look at two "chains" that reasonably typify two types of photography enthusiast, whom I'll label "hobbyist" and "maven." (Those aren't standard terms. You could make up your own names, such as amateur vs. advanced amateur.)

Hobbyist

Camera with APS-C or smaller sensor : kit zoom lens or in some cases a fixed** zoom lens : camera set to sRGB color space : shoot JPEGs set on "High" or "Fine" or whatever the top setting on your camera is : 24", 25", or 27" IPS monitor that covers 100% of the sRGB color space : basic free, low cost, or bundled Photo Editing program such as Corel AfterShot, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Photos for Windows 10, or Apple Photos : presentation through private device-to-device sharing or posting on the Web, augmented by occasionally having smallish prints made by one of the various printing services such as Shutterfly, Amazon Photos, Mpix, Snapfish, Printique, Costco (which still does prints online for members), etc., virtually all of which are standardized to work with sRGB files.

Maven

Camera with FF or larger sensor : selection of good-quality interchangable lenses : camera set to AdobeRGB color space : shoot raw : 27" or 32" IPS monitor that covers all or almost all of the AdobeRGB color space : at-home monitor calibration using a colorimeter such as the DataColor SpyderX : sophisticated purchased or subscription photo editing software that incorporates a raw converter, such as Adobe Lightroom, Phase One Capture One, DxO PhotoLab (which as of v.5 supports Fuji X-Trans files), or Corel PaintShop Pro, working in 16 bits : pigment-ink Canon or Epson home printer, commonly the Epson P900 or Canon Pro-1000 or higher : largish prints on fine papers such as Canson Platine or Epson Exhibition Fiber : stored in an archival clamshell box or museum solander case.

A simple way to control color is to settle on sRGB as your color space and JPEGs as your file type. Those are both camera settings: you choose them in the camera menu. It used to be that these choices sort of horrified the maven, who considered them inadequate. And they were, once upon a time. But that's dated information now. The fact is that JPEGs are very good with today's high-resolution cameras, and offer a reasonable amount of correction and recovery, and yield nice prints. If you need more, you'll know soon enough.

So what the heck is P3?
If you're shopping for monitors, one thing you'll come across is that some monitors don't specify the percentage of Adobe RGB they cover. Instead, they'll give the percentage of coverage for P3. What is P3?

Go back to the illustration at the top of the page. If you look at the P3 triangle, you'll see that it's roughly the size of the Adobe RGB triangle, but offset somewhat. P3 has its origins in DCI-P3, a color standard devised by Digital Cinema Initiatives, yet another group of experts like the CIE or the JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group, which created all the various JPEG standards), this one working for all the major movie studios. DCI-P3 is a standard for digital movies intended to be shown in darkened theaters. 

So then shouldn't P3 be called DCI-P3? Not so fast; it isn't, exactly. Back in the top illustration again, see those little dots labeled "~6300 white point" and "D65 white point"? The DCI-P3 color space specifies a non-standard, slightly greenish white point. Why? To take into account the characteristics of typical xenon-arc digital movie projectors!

Starting with the iPhone 7, Apple allowed for P3 tagging in images and videos, because, you know, video has been infiltrating and effing-up our previously cozy little still-photography universe for some time now. (Ahem. Editorializing, Mike?) But it didn't want a greenish white point. So it created "Display P3," which is DCI-P3 but with a standard 6500K (K in this instance standing for "Kelvin," not "Key") white point. "P3" is short for Display P3. In 2017, Instagram followed Apple's lead and now makes accommodation for P3 workflows.

So a monitor that specifies P3 coverage and not Adobe RGB is just a manufacturer acknowledging that the monitor is more likely to be used for video than for still photography. If you want to know how much of Adobe RGB it covers, it might be easy to find out, or it might not be.

End of P3 digression!

In summary
So if you are a phone shooter who wants to get more into photography, or a color photographer who has a good camera but is stumbling around in the dark when it comes to color management (that's been all of us at one point or another, let's not lie), the trick is to start from the final disposition you intend for your pictures and then work backwards from there. If you mainly look at your pictures on a monitor, send them in emails or texts to friends, and only occasionally have a print made by an outside service bureau (as they used to be called and might still be for all I know), then sRGB is for you. Set your camera on sRGB and shoot JPEGs, choose an IPS computer monitor that covers 100% of sRGB, and save your edited pictures in sRGB, and you are the master of all you survey. I would still recommend calibrating your monitor regularly (meaning, every two to six months), using something like the SpyderX. You might think this is excessive and extravagant for your modest mid-range camera and a modest workflow, but it isn't—it's what separates the adults from the juveniles***. The whole Internet is standardized to sRGB, and it's not only how they see you that is affected. How you see them is affected as well! Wouldn't you rather see pictures as professional content providers intend them to be seen? I should think that if you like photographs, you would. A decent-to-excellent monitor without regular calibration is like Bugs Bunny without a carrot. That's why the best monitors come with calibration hardware, in some cases built in.

If you want to print your own pictures at home, on the other hand, then set your camera to Adobe RGB, shoot raw, and have fun with your super-powerful editing program, your beautiful if high-maintenance home pigment printer, and especially, all those awesomely gorgeous papers we can buy now! (But if you can do all that, this particular article has been too basic for you.)

And if you really want color management made VERY simple, as the title of this post promises? Why, then, do what I do—shoot with a monochrome sensor and work exclusively in black-and-white!****

Mike

*Well, the x-y coordinates of it, anyway—CIE 1931 is actually a three-dimensional plot, the Z dimension being luminance. For every point on Z, there is a different and unique x-y.

**A fixed lens is one that is permanently attached to the camera, whether it is a zoom (variable focal length / angle of view), such as the excellent Panasonic LX-100 II, or prime (single focal length / angle of view), such as the excellent Ricoh GRIIIx.

***Formerly "the men from the boys," but no longer gender-biased.

****You laugh, but that may be the only way color management can really be made truly simple. As I said last week, "Color management is a strange subject—you can get by with almost any amount of sloppiness if you're a slacker, but if you want real precision, you can get very far into the weeds with it."

Featured Comments from:

ADDENDUM: As I tried to reaffirm at the end of this piece, color management is actually not simple. But I disagree in substance with commenter Patrick Dodds, who writes, "Somewhere in all of this, the fun starts to dissipate." My experience in photography over many years is that you just do what you have to do in order to do the work you want to do. Cartier-Bresson said that it took him three days to master the Leica. When digital matured, Peter Turnley bought two DSLRs and hired an expert to help him master them; they put in three long days of intense work until Peter knew enough, and then he resumed his photography, picking up where he left off with film. Mark Klett managed to master Polaroid Type 55 Positive/Negative film, a touchy and cantankerous material that offered limited control, making beautiful and distinctive work with it (actually, come to think, he was the only one I know of who did). Richard Misrach  felt he had no choice but to tame Cibachrome by mastering masking technique. It really doesn't matter where the difficulty arises; you just have to master your materials and methods to the degree you feel you need to. The corollary is that you don't have to master what you don't need: learning a great potpourri of techniques you'll never use is just a distraction, a different pursuit than the pursuit of pictures.

Again and again in my life, meeting great and good photographers, I found that most were deep masters of the specifics of their chosen techniques and surprisingly ignorant of others. That extended even to pros—I've written several times (because it amused me) about a studio pro I worked for who had $150,000 worth of pack-and-head strobes and other sophisticated lighting equipment in his studio and didn't know bupkus about on-camera thyristor flash units that mount to the hot shoe—the items most people call "a flash." He didn't use them. He knew nothing about them. He knew what he needed to know.

Almost no matter what "chain" you use, you will encounter specific questions and specific difficulties. You just need to keep gnawing at them until you either understand, or have to give up, or find a workaround. Technique is part of photography. We persist: we keep after it until we get it. Mastery is mandatory. Simple or involved, up-to-the-minute or antiquarian, narrow or broad, prestigious or "low-fi," highly technical or anti-technique—it doesn't really matter. All that matters is the work. Figure out where you want to end up, and then keep learning until you know how to get there. Just my suggestion.

Featured Comments:

Ernest Zarate: "Re '…the trick is start from the final disposition you intend (for your pictures) and work backwards.' In my 67 years, I have found that this approach works in many situations. Have used it for decades, and found very satisfying results. I stumbled upon it when I noticed a lot of people worked the other way: they’d get something and then try like hell to figure how to get it to do what they wanted. A very frustrating experience. Good article, Michael, with a terrific way of making a lot of this accessible."

Phil: "Thanks for this, Mike. It fills in several gaps in my knowledge about colour spaces, etc. And now I'm convinced, I really should get a calibrator for my monitor."

Mike replies: You really should. There's a reason many of the best monitors come with calibration hardware, or, in the case of the upper-range EIZOs, have it built in. The trouble is that there's not a lot of positive reward; it merely prevents a negative penalty. So there's not a lot of reinforcement for what feels to most like an excessive expense.

Monitors really run the gamut, no pun intended. Bad ones are remarkably horrible (well, for photography anyway), and good ones can be impressively wonderful. I'm working to write an article about how to buy an inexpensive monitor, but, after composing a list of minimum requirements, I've struggled to find a specific model that encompasses them all. Each one seems to have one little area where they skimp to an unacceptable degree on something—color space, bit depth, resolution, something. Different models skimp in different ways, but none of them quite come all the way up to my chosen minimum standards. Then I'll find one—only to discover that it isn't exactly cheap! I've been calling manufacturers and reading spec sheets till I'm bleary-eyed. It's really hard.

Niels: "Thanks! Now I don't feel as bad shooting JPEG only. I always get shamed if I mention that on an online forum. I didn't see the benefit of shooting RAW, only storage cost and wasted time in front of the monitor, so I stopped a few years ago."

Mike replies: I believe Ken Rockwell shoots JPEG-only as well. I've shot raw since Bruce Fraser's book came out many years ago, and still do, but I think JPEG in most camera is a much better option now than it was then.

David Haynes: "Many comments on this post mention ProPhotoRGB, which is the largest color space available in Photoshop and most other photo editing programs. I fit best in the 'Maven' category and shoot raw, use DxO PhotoLab to develop the raw files (exporting to ProPhotoRGB 16 bit), use ProPhotoRGB while editing, then convert to AdobeRGB for printing or sRGB for online uses. Photoshop is my primary editing tool, but my workflow includes quite a few other programs or third-party filters (Escape Motions, Topaz Labs, and so forth). I have found that using ProPhotoRGB while editing allows the tools to output the widest range of color, even though some may be 'out of gamut' for both the screen and printer. Converting to AdobeRGB for printing, or sRGB for the web, takes care of that. Perhaps I am going overboard and not really gaining anything by using ProPhotoRGB. However, the workflow works for me, and that is the bottom line."

Moose (partial comment): "Color management is fairly easy, if you don't care about absolute accuracy. Were I a catalog photographer, this would be crucial knowledge and skill. My employers would not want returns; 'Not the color in the catalog.' An argument may be made for photographing art for reproduction. But, do I want to have the reproduction in a book to look like the original in the quite dim, oddly balanced lighting in many museums these days? Or perhaps in the lighting in which, for which it was originally painted? In the bright lighting museums used to use, to make the art pop. Same problem with color portraiture. Hold up print next to subject; but our skin colors vary, with age, time of day, health, and so on, and is it in the light in which the photo was taken? Who can know exactly what color that dahlia, that house, that goldfinch, those fall leaves, that water, actually was? The answer is no one. Then (sigh), if you follow recent developments in human vision, it becomes clear that we see color in a very different way than do cameras. It is far from the neat, three color model we tend to imagine.

"It seems valid to me to adjust the photo, including color balance, saturation, etc. to reproduce what I saw in my mind's eye, even as I knew the camera would not capture than, but would capture the raw material for creating something close to it. So, sure, a reasonably well calibrated monitor, and decent printer profiles, etc. are useful, but not worth obsessing about."

Mike replies: That's very true. But if your "chain" of equipment, materials, and methods are giving you fits, and actively frustrating you, such that you're not able to "adjust the photo, including color balance, saturation, etc. to reproduce what you saw in your mind's eye," then rudimentary color management might be the thing that makes things easier. All a matter of balance, though, I agree.

Comments

[Keith Cartmell]

Hmmm. Interesting. As always, I seem to be off in left field. Nice camera (6Dmkii and L quality lenses), use Lightroom, and almost all my work goes on line. Camera is set to sRGB, and Lightroom exports to JPEG and sRGB. I've done a few prints, and I'm pretty sure I gave the printer a TIFF sRGB file, and they didn't complain.
After some reading, I think that for most of my images, I change nothing. It's only if I want to print, that I should be exporting as Adobe RGB. Right, I hope? So what's the ProPhoto RGB option all about?

[Lynn Cox]

I really like the way you discuss the subject. Maybe I'm wrong but I think a lot of folks get confused about color. I could go on and on, Albers, Munsell, Itten, Goethe et al.
That said, I'll throw some tinder on the fire, ProPhoto RGB.

[Robert Roaldi]

A couple of times in my life, I thought I understood this, but now I'm confused again. If I shoot raw and only ever print from the editing program (Affinity) in which I have been editing my raw file, why would setting the camera to Adobe RGB make any difference to anything?

[I think I answered that...as best I can anyway. --Mike]

[Ralf]

Somewhat related: I've recently invested in a wide color gamut monitor which looks glorious with HDR content (DisplayHDR 1400 is a very different beast from most of today's "HDR" TVs).

I thought "there must be a way to make use of this for my RAW files" which have a much larger dynamic range that usually gets compressed to sRGB or AdobeRGB, so I was kinda hoping to use the new display to get to look at my pictures in a different way. Turns out that this is apparently not something that's common (yet?).

Darktable can export .exr files with Rec2020 color space, but I have a hard time even finding a viewer that can display this without applying some tone mapping to compress it down to the usual display requirements.

"HDR + WCG Image Viewer" for Windows seems closest but has an awkward "brightness" slider...

I read that recent iPhones by default take HDR pictures in HEIF format intended to be displayed on basically just that device itself, so there's no real software support for viewing these files elsewhere... or I haven't found it. Maybe someone here knows more?

[Aaron]

This is a quibble and you do qualify this as what might reasonably typify the two chains, but still: I think it smacks of a bit of full-frame snobbery to include sensor size in the description of the chain. I'd bet lots of money that a sizeable majority of full-frame users are "Hobbyists" and plenty of smaller format photographers have use cases of the "Maven." Or, I'd be surprised if the percentages of each are really that different.

[Wozcraft]

Very interesting but purely academic for myself and a substantial proportion of the male population who, like me, are mildly colour blind.
I had to give up making my own prints after my artist wife kept commenting on the slightly orange skin tones and other curious results produced by my carefully set up printer.

[I've known two artists like you: Mark L. Power, who was a mostly B&W photographer but did do some color, and Peter Milton the printmaker...you can see his solution at this gallery page:

https://www.warnockfinearts.com/peter-milton

I was a student at Dartmouth when he was artist-in-residence. He called me over to see a painting one day--he was epxerimenting with color--and the two of us tried to get the color right on the shadow under a woman's arm. It was not the blind leading the blind but the clueless leading the colorblind...together we couldn't get it right. --Mike]

[Guy T]

I’m confused! I shoot in raw and edit in Lightroom set to use the ProPhoto RGB color space. You don’t mention ProPhoto RGB in the text but it appears to be the widest gamut in the first graph.
I understood that the camera setting has no effect on raw files. Is that correct?
I print directly from Lightroom to my printer and expect Lightroom to adjust to the full color gamut available in the printer.
I export jpg files from Lightroom for viewing on a display and expect Lightroom to convert them to sRGB appropriately.
Am I a super-maven or just super-confused?

[psu]

1. IMHO there isn't too much point in specifying color space in the camera when shooting RAW files because (I think) most RAW editors/processors will work in some working color space specific to the tool. The Adobe tools used to use a variant of this Pro Photo RGB for example ... but i guess now they use P3 if your display can handle it.

You then export out of the editing tool to whatever color space you want.

2. HEIF/HEIC has support these days in some tools, Lightroom will certainly read the files

[Marc]

Hi Mike,
Not related to your post but I want to share an info that may benefit several of your readers.
As you know, Adobe does not give access to the Pantone colors anymore. An artist made a one that easily replace the missing palette and it’s free:
https://t.co/HuiEYwVD6f

Maybe worth a note in a post.

[Merle]

And, since most of us don't have a monochrome sensor, there's a very well-written article on B&W conversions, filters, etc. here: https://www.35mmc.com/31/05/2021/colour-theory-for-black-and-white-photography-part-1-digital-and-analogue-filters-by-sroyon/

...which makes it seem a little more than "simple", to me at least.

[Jeff Schewe]

Did you forget about ProPhoto RGB? That’s what I’ve been using since Kodak came up with it (in Photoshop 5.0 time) and Bruce Fraser encouraged me.

[Dave_lumb]

You lost me at "CIE 1931 is the big color blob in the background."

[There's a Wikipedia article about it. CIE 1931 was the first thorough attempt to quantitatively link wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum with psychologically perceived colors in human color vision. It's represented by the colored background shape in that graph.

All you need to know is that shape represents graphically "all the colors the human eye can perceive." The superimposed triangles then represent the limits of the colors encompassed by the various standard color spaces. Is that clear? --Mike]

[Patrick Dodds]

Somewhere in all of this, the fun starts to dissipate.

[Sylvain G.]

Truly one of your best "primer" articles Mike !
Almost made me want to get back to home pigment printing... right after having eventually dumped my frustrating B9180 just last week.
Brilliant ! Thanks !

[I have to admit the B9180 was what sounded the death knell to my digital printing, as it turned out. Just a Sisyphean level of frustration trying to keep it firing on all cylinders. I think HP replaced mine twice, to a total of three. But such great results when it WAS working. Impressively, it was also the device that made HP give up on that whole segment of the printer marketplace. IIRC, they made one more variant of it and that was it for them in home pigment fine-art printers. (Although as I say that, I realize I have no idea what they're making now.) --Mike]

[Marc Rochkind]

You left out a big part of color management. No matter what the color space, an image is represented as an collection of numbers. A computer display translates numbers to colors, as does a printer. It's necessary to manage these numbers by calibrating and/or profiling the computer display and the printer, so that the numbers are appropriately translated when the image is displayed or printed. Among other things, editing an image involves changing the numbers so that the displayed or printed image has the right colors. If this is not done, what colors you get are uncontrolled and most likely not what you intend.

[Mark L]

Mmm, type 55 pos/neg...
Try Christopher Thomas, his books on New York, Venice, Paris, L.A..
All taken on type 55, deserted cities, mainly at night, I think they're wonderful.

All the best, Mark

[Timothy Gray]

I’m puzzled by the recommendation to use AdobeRGB if shooting RAW. Mike, can you explain why the need to worry about a color space in camera if your intent is to process a RAW file? Does the color space in a RAW workflow not come into question until the end when exporting to Photoshop for printing?

[The explanation I saw was that it makes the histogram more accurate to the colors that are being captured. I don't know if that's true; the source also referred vaguely to "other camera settings" but I don't know what those are. Of course you don't really have to set it to Adobe RGB. I don't actually know why the Adobe RGB setting is available in cameras...I guess for people who are taking JPEGs but then also printing? Other than that I don't know. --Mike]

[Rob de Loe]

At this time of year (mid-November), my students see their final projects for the first time in draft form on the 12" x 18" paper we use for the final prints. Without fail, there will be a few who do not understand why their prints look the way they do. It can be colour problems, sharpening problems, blown highlights, you name it.

I grit my teeth whenever the questions start as we're looking at their prints because all questions -- without fail -- were answered in the readings, in my lectures, and in the lab sessions.

Students will be students (and I'm sure I didn't read everything either when I was a student). But it's yet another example to support your point about needing to learn what you need to know to do good work.

It's not just photography either. Is there an art or craft that can be practised at a high level by people who know nothing about techniques, materials, etc.?

[Moose]

"As I tried to reaffirm at the end of this piece, color management is actually not simple."

Counterpoint:

It is fairly easy - if - you don't care about absolute accuracy.

Were I a catalog photographer, this would be crucial knowledge and skill. My employers would not want returns; "Not the color in the catalog."

An argument may be made for photographing art for reproduction. But, do I want to have the reproduction in a book to look like the original in the quite dim, oddly balanced lighting in many museums these days? Or perhaps in the lighting in which, for which it was originally painted? In the bright lighting museums used to use, to make the art pop.

Same problem with color portraiture. Hold up print next to subject; but our skin colors vary, with age, time of day, health, and so on, and is it in the light in which the photo was taken?

Who can know exactly what color that dahlia, that house, that goldfinch, those fall leaves, that water, actually was. The answer is No One.

Then (sigh), if you follow recent developments in human vision, it becomes clear that we see color in a very different way than do cameras. It is far from the neat, three color model we tend to imagine.

The often touted idea that what the camera saw is somehow accurate is wrong, and particularly wrong when the result is intended to reproduce, to at least some extent, what a person would have seen, and felt about it, were they there when the photo was taken.

Three comments to the last post address this rather well:

"To make a meaningful photograph you have to show what you feel, not necessarily what you see."
— Posted by: Bob Johnston

"But Mike, this is nothing new: theory, science and mathematics operate on a level removed from the artistic."
— Posted by: Rob Campbell

"As photographers and printers we are not duplicating ... we are interpreting."
— Posted by: Speed

Going a bit further in their direction, it seems valid to me to adjust the photo, including color balance, saturation, etc. to reproduce what I saw in my minds eye, even as I knew the camera would not capture than, but would capture the raw material for creating something close to it.

So, sure a reasonably well calibrated monitor, and decent printer profiles, etc. are useful, but not worth obsessing about. Use that time and mental energy to take and make pictures. \;~)>

[Bob Johnston]

It was a good essay Mike. May I add a few points that might clarify some things.

All this stuff is there because each component in the chain 'sees' colours differently. When you look at your monitor you are seeing in the monitors colour space. Your processing software, such as Lightroom or Photoshop converts the colours to your monitors space on the fly. Your calibrator creates the profile that enables this.

Yes, Adobe rgb is there for those that want to print without using raw. It gives a somewhat more accurate camera histogram if you are using raw. Raw does not have a colour space as it's just a bunch of bits that have not yet been arranged into an image file - a process called demosaicing.

There is no such thing as a single CMYK colour space for inkjet printers. The colour space (at this point usually called the gamut) depends on the printer/ink/paper combination. Hence profiles are available for those combinations. Profiles tell the software how to convert one units space to another. Note that you can convert the larger prophoto or argb, for example, to srgb, although you will lose colour information in doing so. It's pointless to try to convert the smaller srb to the larger argb because the colours are not there.

SRGB is limiting for printing because high end inkjet printers, like Ctein's P800, can print colours that cannot be contained in the srgb space.

Prophoto is used by mavens because they do not lose any data. All the colours that the camera can record are in there. So, when the processing software or printer improves they can reprocess the file. However, if you want to use Prophoto, it's necessary to convert the raw to a 16 bit file.

Of course, for black and white from your camera Mike, it matters not a jot what you use. Srgb is perfectly OK.

[Bob Johnston]

I should add that the other reason for 16 bit prophoto is that you can make large changes to the file in your editor without running into banding and colour clipping that you might get in 8 bit srgb.

[Steve Rosenblum]

1. Excellent article,though I use ProPhoto RGB space for editing. 2. What Mark Rochkind said.

[kevin willoughby]

Mike, I do understand that the final paragraph was written with tongue in cheek, but there are color management issues within B&W printing.

The tonal scale of a good B&W print is rarely pure white through neutral grays to pure black. Ansel Adams prints were processed to a slightly purple tone. Agfa Portriga prints are more of a cream&light brown tone than a pure black and white tone.

Alas, I don't know of any way to get these effects in the digital world short of a lot of trial and error.

[Ken Monroe]

How's about a primer on the steps you take to go from a monochrome sensor through your editing software, with a final goal of either print or Web?