A Question On Color Space.

[Garbz]

Ok just a quick possible look at how you may be approaching this wrong, since changing the working space should have absolutely no impact on how a print matches what you see on the screen.

I asked about your screen, and as it turns out it is a wide gamut screen, capable of displaying just a tad over the AdobeRGB gamut. In such a case if you set up the colour management properly your prints should always match what is on the screen. This is not so for people with normal screens where good quality AdobeRGB prints should have richer colours than on the screen.

I get the feeling that by switching to AdobeRGB you're more closely matching the screen because your applications aren't aware of the screen's colour gamut, so:

a) Do you use a calibration unit.
b) Do you use colour managed software for your work (i.e. Photoshop/Lightroom for editing, ACDSee Pro2 with the correct profile selected for viewing etc). What's your process?

 

[aerialphoto]

I probably didn't make my original point very clear, obviously. My point wasn't about print matching, it was about color. I had two images (in particular) that simply were never quite right. Both had subjects that were predominately deep blue. Working in sRGB I simply could not get an image that was true to life.

Switching to a wider-gamut profile (I used proPhoto RGB initially but Adobe '98 works too) make it a non-issue and the resulting images were virtually perfect. Converting to sRGB made it look cruddy, and no amount of tweaking makes them look right.

That related to the original question because had I shot sRGB .jpgs I would have probably never been able to get these images to look right. Fortunately I shoot raw and just had to change my workflow a little from the start.

The end result were the perfect prints I was looking for, but that's because my entire workflow was based on the same wide-gamut color space. Had I uploaded those images to a service that is only sRGB-based (smugmug and zenfolio come to mind) then they would have been converted to sRGB, the colors would have been destroyed, and the final prints would have been lousy. That problem might hold true with other services and labs too so it's worth being aware of.

 

[Garbz]

Ko!

Yeah very true. Actually finding a good lab that is colour space aware is definitely more challenging then it should be at this day and age.

 

[Shockey]

If you are at the stage in your development as a photographer that you need to ask the question...then the answer is no, there is no advantage.
Don't take that as a negative.
For people who are very into PP and printing and color profiles matching etc. etc. there may be some validity to working with RGB. For the rest of us it would be an unnecessary complication.