Gotta love coming to a place to ask questions and get a "go to google" answer...why even come here to ask questions then? When I have a specific question, I generally go to where I would get a good answer...if I have a car question, I pose it at a car geek forum, computer security questions I go to a computer forum such as
antionline.com
But apparently that is fallible thinking, I COULD just go to google...silly Drex
LOL... yeah, I think the exact same thing sometimes when I browse threads and see someone that advises the OP to search Google for the answer. What a cop-out!
I'll concede that some questions are just waaaaay to general or involved for a forum to effectively cover... in that case, the answer would legitimately be," You have a lot of learning to do... do some of your own research first."
But most questions aren't really like that... and you're right... why bother having a forum at all if we could all just Google our answers? To have cheeky little chit-chats about sweet nothings? People come to forums for one-on-one advice from members... not to be sent off to Google.
And elie1... although I am no expert on the technicalities of color spaces, here's what I can tell you.
Basically, sRGB is far-and-wide the world standard color space... readable and displayable by most everything. When you are ready to begin distributing your photographs for any purpose, your best bet is to convert them to sRGB color space. It'll provide the most consistent colors across all different softwares, displays, and printers.
Adobe RGB is a kind of color compression technique that adds a greater range of possible colors to a photograph. So, hypothetically, you
can retain a greater range of color within a photograph saved in Adobe RGB color space. However, Adobe RGB is also rather tricky, because if the software you are viewing it with is not specifically equipped to deal with the extra colors... the photograph will, in contrast, end up looking somewhat washed out. Plenty of high-end graphics editing software can handle the Adobe RGB color space... but the ordinary person that you may e-mail your photos to probably doesn't know that. The ordinary web browser, too, will ignore the Adobe RGB color space. And, perhaps most frustrating, if your Adobe RGB photo is printed out with software that doesn't recognize the expanded range of color... the colors will actually look worse than if you just used sRGB.
I've seriously simplified things here... but you get the idea (I hope). Whenever I export my photographs, I always do so using an sRGB color space.
However, I have my camera set to take photos using the Adobe RGB color space... and when editing them in Lightroom, which recognizes and makes use of the expanded color range, I can retain more usable data. Nonetheless, no photo leaves my computer without being reduced to sRGB... it's just the best way to ensure that, no matter where they end up, they'll produce consistent color results.