Is ProPhoto and colour management in general worth it?

[PhotoWrangler]

Can we start this thread over and use the BIG CRAYONS please?


ETA: Ok... so if all the colors in known existence were boxed and sold in the school supplies isle at WalMart, sRGB would be box of 8 crayons, AdobeRGB would be the box of 24, and ProPhoto would be the box of 101 with the little sharpener in the back.

What are 'bits' and why is 16 better than 8 though?

 

[Mike_E]

As I get older I seem to be having less and less time. Maybe it's the teenagers.

The short and sweet..:

Snapshots = sRGB

Serious work = Adobe RGB 1998

Pull it apart and put it back together because I want the best = LAB.

Thanks for posting Garbz, interesting as always.

 

[Garbz]

Ok you have this backwards. Think of it like this.

You go looking for crayons. You find boxes of 6 crayons, and boxes of 12 crayons. The number of crayons in your box is the bits. This is the number of possible discrete colour values you can have. In an 8bit image you have 255 shades of red, green, and blue in combinations, or 16.7million crayons. With a 16bit image you have 65535 possible shades of red green and blue in combinations, or 281.4trillion crayons.

Now getting these boxes from different manufactures you may end up with different colours.
One manufacturer's box of 8 crayons may have: Steel blue, sky blue, sea green, olive, brown, orchid, white and black. These are generally dull colours and would be comparable to sRGB (a small gamut)
Another manufacturer's box of 8 crayons may have: Deep blue, Cyan, Green, yellow, Red, Magenta, white and black. These are very bright and pure colours which would be comparable to a larger gamut like (AdobeRGB).
Both only offered you 8 colours but one's colours are much more pure. But notice that the one with more pure colours is missing some like brown, olive, etc? This is the result of using a wide gamut with a small bitdepth. Not every colour can be represented.

To tie this all back together. Look at the very top chart. This is the CIE1931 chart and the horsehoe represents all the visible colours at full saturation the human eye can see. The triangles represent the gamuts that can be made by combinations of a certain value of red, green and blue. The closer to the edge of the horseshoe the more pure the colour. The number at the edge is a single wavelength, and if you've ever worked with high quality lasers, or a high quality diffraction grating, that's the pure colours we are talking about.

If you want to see a colour that can't be displayed in sRGB look at this diagram I whipped up in photoshop: http://www.garbz.com/colourwow.gif Take note of the red colour in the left image, now move your head close to the screen and stare at the white dot for about 30 seconds or so. Now take your head away and gasp in the glory of the amazing saturation the cyan now has. This is not a colour you can reproduce on your screen.

 

[Drew1992]

Garbz,
Forgive me if I skimmed over some of your info above too quickly, that is A LOT of information! I have information overload as it is! ;-)
So, let me understand this more clearly. You edit in RAW images in AdobeRGB in 16 bit on a wide gamut monitor(such as the NEC MultiSync 2490WUXi2 I purchased) and then convert your images to a jpeg in sRGB 8 bit before sending to the lab for printing? You were right awhile back when you told me about what a headache some of this is! My images on my new monitor do look a bit more saturated compared to viewing them on a normal, uncalibrated monitor. I have been editing in sRGB in 16 bit and sending my images to my lab in sRGB. I use LR, ACR, CS5 and I am now using a trial version of NIK Viveza 2.

 

[Garbz]

Not quite. I process my file for the end game. I edit in the best quality I can get (16bit, AdobeRGB) and then decide on what to do with the file when I'm finished. For printing I use a lab which can take advantage of the wide gamuts (I don't print often), so I send my files to the web in AdobeRGB.

But other than that the end game for the vast majority of my images is a computer monitor. Unless I'm taking a photo of something that has a lot of colour outside the sRGB gamut (saturated sunset, fire, etc) I don't lose much (if anything) by saving in sRGB and 8bit. I would lose by saving AdobeRGB in 8bit, so the end result is that the vast majority of my files end up as either sRGB JPEGs, with the occasional AdobeRGB TIFF.

 

[Drew1992]

Garbz,

Got it! Thanks so very much! I've been trying to figure out what I should be editing in, sRGB or AdobeRGB and which bit depth 8 or 16. So many opinions and variations. I just want to produce some great images(mostly printing as the end result) with great color and be doing it all correctly!

 

[Drew1992]

Garbz,

One more question:
I've calibrated my NEC MultiSync 2490WUXi2 with a Spyder 3 Elite Colorimeter using the SpectraView II Software. From what I've read in the info that came with the software, that I should use the Native(Full) setting for the Color Gamut. Do you think that's the best? In the preferences, for the "Source of Primary Color for Chromaticities for ICC profile" I chose the factory Measurements from during production of my NEC Monitor. Also wondering if that was a good choice as well.

Thanks!

 

[Garbz]

The Spyder II needed the "Factory Measurement" option ticked, the Spyder III doesn't. It was for colourimeters which were incompatible with the wide gamut of the display. They could still ensure accurate colour tracking curves on the monitor while using the ICC profile information from the manufacturer. Typically you want to chose your measurement device for the source of chroma if your colourimeter was compatible with it.

The rest of the options I set to native. The reason is that at native you limit your changes which reduce dynamic range of the display. I.e. if you calibrate to say 6500k and your display is 5000k then you need to turn down the red on the display limiting the dynamic range and set of useful red values. Changes should be made when comparing an image between different mediums. I.e. you have 2 monitors, set them to a specific white balance. You compare image to a print in a lightbox, set the white balance to match the paper. Your eyes can't adjust to the monitor because the room is too bright, set the white balance to match the room. etc.

Same with all other settings.

 

[Drew1992]

Thanks! I was pretty sure about the Native(Full) setting, but not the Factory Measurement one. That helps, thanks!
You are a walking talking(or typing that is!) Photography & Technology dictionary! You know so much! Thank you! I have to admit, I have been obsessing (just a little bit) over whether or not my monitor will match my prints. Even though I have read your other posts on Color Mgmt., I have chose to stick with sRGB as my color space for editing so that what I see on my monitor is what I'll see after getting my prints back from a lab. Being a newbie at all of this, I want my monitor to be as close as possible to my prints. Another question: When comparing my Wide gamut monitor to my laptop, should they look very different from each other? For example, my laptop colors seem cooler, more blue-ish grey(when looking at Lightroom or Cs5 interface for example) and my wide gamut monitor is more on the brown-ish grey side. I realize that they aren't suppose to match unless I have calibrated using the studio match. Are the photo editing color spaces more on the brown-ish and grey side rather than the blue-ish grey I see on my laptop(windows colorspace?) Just wondering....

 

[Garbz]

Yes sort of maybe

Depends on the default theme. In windows the default colours aren't perfectly grey. When they have some colour in them on the wide gamut display the colours will appear more saturated. If the colour theme is slightly orange then it would look more orange on the wide gamut monitor.

That said Photoshop's interface has a middle grey background. The differences in colour here are due to the white balance of the backlight. Monitors very rarely match. My Desktop monitor has ~5200K my laptop ~6100k, and my phone ~8400k. This doesn't matter unless I am comparing images on them side by side. If I use each in isolation my vision adjusts.

At work where I have a screen next to my laptop display it really gives me the ****s


As for being a dictionary, just remember a dictionary only provides definitions and reference, not guidance on how to speak . What I may say could be right but may not work for you at a given time.