sRGB or ADOBE RGB

[HeY iTs ScOTtY]

just wondering if anyone actually use adobe rgb and can tell me if they actually notice the difference when using it that makes it worthwhile.

 

[ann]

you can see the difference when printing.

unless you have a very expensive high end monitor you will not see the difference on the monitor.

 

[KmH]

Capture and post process in AbobeRGB, output as sRGB for web or print.

 

[musicaleCA]

unless you have a very expensive high end monitor you will not see the difference on the monitor.

Yes, yes you will. If you look at an AdobeRGB or ProPhoto RGB image on a monitor (sRGB) with a program that doesn't have colour management, the image will look brown and washed-out (particularly greens) with the former, and have a whole ton of blackened and fugly colours with the latter.

I capture in RAW (which doesn't have a colourspace) and post-process in ProPhoto RGB (LR2 and CS4). Export to sRGB for web viewing, ProPhoto RGB when printing through a professional printer. Though to be honest, the actual differences are slight; it's hard to see any difference between sRGB, Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto RGB unless you have a photo with say, super-saturated reds, greens, and blues, right next to each other.

 

[Garbz]

I wrote a big thing on the benefits of using wider gamut colours giving an oversaturated example and a lot of detail on what could go wrong here: http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/...prophoto-colour-management-general-worth.html

Basically the gist of it is:

sRGB:
+ It's easy.
+ There's no colour management to deal with which can be a BIG headache to learn.
+ Nearly every image that hasn't been artificially saturated fits comfortably inside sRGB.
+ The most colourful images you have seen on the net are sRGB.
+ Using 8bit colour you can represent all visible shades in the sRGB gamut.
+ It's a standard so everyone can work with it.
+ Your screen is sRGB so you can see the colours as they should appear.

AdobeRGB:
+ It's a wider gamut if only slightly.
+ Some very high end printing companies support it. Often you need to hunt for the ones you do.
/ While some printers do extend outside sRGB it doesn't mean AdobeRGB covers them. The extent is not the same in every direction. You may find you end up with possible extra range in the greens but not in the reds or blues. Again this depends on your printer.
- Most screens can't see the entire gamut.
- Most printers can't print the entire gamut.
- Most cheap professional printers can print enough of the gamut to make AdobeRGB worthwhile but the company who does the printing won't support it for you.
- It's not a standard so if you accidentally upload it to the net you'll usually end up with retarded desaturated and brown colours. And if someone is using a colour managed browser then it's unlikely they can display all the colours anyway.
- 8bit depth is not sufficient to display all the colours so you should work in 16bit where possible, sometimes this is not possible which leads to branding.
- Colour management is a headache that you must experience when using AdobeRGB.
- Colour conversion is a lossy and imperfect process with many options. Opening and saving in sRGB, reduces the amount of conversions necessary.

I'm sure I've left some things out. Overall I use AdobeRGB because I have a monitor capable of displaying the entire AdobeRGB spectrum, but my default actions are always without fail to save and store my files in sRGB. The preference to this is simply that they are transferable and smaller (because I save 8bit files, I mentioned AdobeRGB may lead to branding in 8bits didn't I?) That and I have only every taken a handful of photographs which fell outside sRGB enough that it actually made a visible difference when I converted to sRGB. One was the deepest reddest sunset I have ever seen, and the other was a photo of an LED (which has pure spectral energy at the very edge of the horseshoe chart and isn't even covered by the even wider ProPhotoRGB)

If you use a program like Lightroom, you end up with internal very very wide gamut behind the scenes work and the option to export to whichever format you want. So if you horde RAW files then this is the only way to kind of bypass colour management headaches, and eventually it will be a headache when you get a print back or upload a photo that just looks like crap before you realise what went wrong.