Do you find Gamut Warning useful or useless?

[camerainmyhand]

I'm stumped. I am a self processed ps rookie. The more I learn the more I realize I know very little. I watch tutorials and search around on the web and I think I figure some stuff out. But then I find out something new and I have to go back and start from scratch. It can be frustrating. For a while I was working in JPEGS's and PSD. The I learn that TIFF is one of the only true lossless formats. So now I'm in the process of going back and resaving all my important photo's in TIFF format. It's obviously well worth the effort, but a pain in the @ss nonetheless.

Sorry for the rambling, now onto the actual post. I just stumbled across Gamut Warning and I am clueless. I've heard that it is useful in that it shows you what is to saturated and will come out looking oversaturated/cartoonish. I've also heard that it is a legacy tool from 1995 and doesnt serve much purpose nowadays. The only way I've found to fix this problem is by:
1. turning on gamut warning

2. opening a hue/saturation layer

3. eyedropping the problematic gray areas in the picture

4. adjusting the saturation i.e. usually lowering it until the subject in th photo becomes washed out looking

My question is this. Does it matter enough that it's something I should pay attention to, or is it outdated?
Also if it is useful, am I going about fixing it in the correct way? Because my ps photos end up having a lot less "pop" then they did when I took them.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks everybody.

 

[camerainmyhand]

Is this the wrong section to ask this question?

 

[Jedo_03]

I'm stumped. I am a self processed ps rookie. The more I learn the more I realize I know very little. I watch tutorials and search around on the web and I think I figure some stuff out. But then I find out something new and I have to go back and start from scratch. It can be frustrating. For a while I was working in JPEGS's and PSD. The I learn that TIFF is one of the only true lossless formats. So now I'm in the process of going back and resaving all my important photo's in TIFF format. It's obviously well worth the effort, but a pain in the @ss nonetheless.

Sorry for the rambling, now onto the actual post. I just stumbled across Gamut Warning and I am clueless. I've heard that it is useful in that it shows you what is to saturated and will come out looking oversaturated/cartoonish. I've also heard that it is a legacy tool from 1995 and doesnt serve much purpose nowadays. The only way I've found to fix this problem is by:

1. turning on gamut warning

2. opening a hue/saturation layer

3. eyedropping the problematic gray areas in the picture

4. adjusting the saturation i.e. usually lowering it until the subject in th photo becomes washed out looking

My question is this. Does it matter enough that it's something I should pay attention to, or is it outdated?
Also if it is useful, am I going about fixing it in the correct way? Because my ps photos end up having a lot less "pop" then they did when I took them.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks everybody.

Just a quickie answer here...
No No No.... The function of Gamut Warning is to inform you that a colour in one mode (eg CMYK) is not available in another mode (eg RGB)...
Colour gamut is the range of available colour in a particular mode...
sRGB has a smaller gamut (range/size) than aRGB, which is smaller than CYMK and all of them are infinitely smaller than L*a*b...
So gamut 'warning' is warning you (when you change mode) that a particular colour in the mode you are in doesn't "exist" in the other mode and will look crappy if/when you go to that mode.

And I think what you are describing above as a fix looks like a white balance/saturation adjustment - but is nothing to do with colour gamut...
I'd suggest you borrow a PS book from the library (whatever version you are using and work from that - Scott Kelby will get you started...)
There endeth the lesson
Jedo

 

[Garbz]

This only makes sense to properly setup first. If you're working with the intent to display on the web then setting up your proof to sRGB will show all colours that will be completely saturated. Setting the proof to your monitor space is very useful since it shows you the colours that you cannot display and as such have no idea how saturated they really are. Or more critically it shows how absolutely little information falls outside of sRGB in real life and how much of a waste wide gamut colour profiles are for general photography.

But the most important point is that soft proofing is usually for printing purposes. Setting the colour space to things like Canon PR2 for my printer shows roughly what things would look like if AND ONLY IF, my monitor is perfectly calibrated taking into account brightness, darkness, and ambient light, and I am viewing my photo in a calibrated viewing booth.

 

[camerainmyhand]

Thank you much for the technical know how fellas. Can't say I'm to much closer to really understanding color gamut. But I will def pick up a book at lib and look into it further.

One more question. I am primarily processing my photos for print. I want to put together a portfolio and I am using Adobe RGB 1998 as the color profile. Should I use color gamut as a reference and try and reduce the saturation or just leave it as is and see how they come out?

I'm going to keep on searching around the interwebs, but any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks alot guys.

 

[Garbz]

It's a hit and miss. Colour conversion is a somewhat variable process. If you reduce the saturation you can guarantee your image will fit into the entire gamut, however when actual colour conversion takes place it does so with various rendering intents. One of them clamps the out of gamut colour to the nearest reproduceable colour preserving the colour in the unclamped portions of the image. Another (perceptual) rendering intent adjusts all colour slightly so that out of gamut colours get shifted into the gamut, however produces no visually perceivable change. This is the best idea for photographic purposes.

Generally in your colour managed workflow you should use a gamut large enough to cover all your critical colours, and larger than your target device. For most standard printers and many images sRGB more than fits this purpose. For high end photo printers AdobeRGB may be the better choice. Ignore ProPhoto. The idea is good but it is utterly pointless given the excessive size of the gamut is larger than what most cameras record, what devices display, and what most scenes contain. The larger the gamut the more necessary it becomes to use higher bitdepth in your processing too.

With your working photo work until you're happy with it, and then fire up the soft proofing for your target (in this case the printer profile with both white point and black point compensation enabled). Preview this with various modes and play with it to achieve the best effect. The changes are often very minor as there's not a lot you can do about getting more colour out of the device. It's all a matter of making sure the differences in colours can still be perceived.

Then print.