Colour Space and ICC profiles explained Vol 1

[freewave32]

I understand colour spaces. Useful video for beginners to demonstrate the differences.

Unfortunately at 6 min 53 sec you say, 'if you are going to shoot RAW you want to set your colour space to Adobe RGB'........... you meant to say ProPhoto RGB.

[morrisstudios]

@freewave32 Cameras only have two settings, sRGB and Adobe RGB. What isn't that clear is that if you're shooting RAW then the camera's colour space doesn't matter. The colour of the image is untouched in the camera. It's only effected when you open the file in PhotoShop.

[freewave32]

@morrisstudios

I wasn't talking about the camera settings but the RAW converter, thats what I thought you were relating to. A sensors is a black and white device, the colour data is demosaiced by the RAW converter.

The ISO, shutter speed and aperture are baked into the RAW data, the rest of the camera settings are merely used as tags - starting points that can be changed during RAW conversion, e.g. white balance.

[Scuvrip]

Very nice video :) I bought charged tutorials and was desperate after not understanding what this profiles ment. Thanks to your vivid presentaion I know :)

[woopit2011]

OMG, Dude, you could be a D.J. You have a beautiful voice.

[antonioreyes1987]

Great vid! :)

[jh3835]

good video but what if companies like snapfish, adaromapix, shutterfly requires sRGB to print

[NewAshaStudio]

Question about scanning photos and color space. I have my scanner set to ProPhoto and use Photoshop to import, also ProPhoto. However, the scan looks very heavy on the reds. If I assign AdobeRGB. the colors look fine. I've tried this on my Vista and XP machine, Photoshop CS5 64bit. Am I doing something wrong?

[morrisstudios]

@NewAshaStudio The ProPhoto colour space will have more red colour then Adobe RGB. The colour reproduction is dependant on your monitor. Better monitors will have a wider colour space and will use a colour space compression to display images. Not sure how to do it on a PC but you should be able to change the colour space setting for the monitor to help with the conversion.

[morrisstudios]

@NewAshaStudio part2

It's important to understand that colour has 2 parts. The first is the colour information the file contains. The second is the colour information that is reproduced. ProPhoto RGB is the setting for maintaining the maximum amount of colour in the image. The colour display information is dependant on the output device.

[morrisstudios]

@NewAshaStudio Part 3

From your explanation it's probable that your monitor is able to convert Adobe RGB to sRGB better then going from ProPhoto RGB. This is very common with PC setups. I'm not dissing PC it's just that most setups have a lower end monitor and most Mac user are laptop based and they have a better quality monitor that will handle a larger colour space.

[morrisstudios]

@NewAshaStudio Part 4

Without knowing more about your setup I would suggest that you scan in ProPhoto and make these your master files. Use a working copy for displaying on your computer in Adobe RGB.

[morrisstudios]

@NewAshaStudio Part 5

The other option is to try Adobe lightroom and set the colour display option to a setting that works with your system. Not sure how to do this in Lightroom, but I use this option in Aperture and helps with showing the correct colour because it's using the Aperture colour engine to adjust the colour which is superior to the computers colour engine.

[NewAshaStudio]

Thanks for the clear explanation. I think at 6:54 you meant to say "set your color space to ProPhoto RGB" talking about the applications. Question, should I use stick with ProPhoto RGB for everything even if I'm importing JPEGs in Adobe RGB? Does it matter? I have Photoshop set to ask me whether to accept embedded or use working space, which is set to ProPhoto.

[morrisstudios]

@NewAshaStudio The advantage of ProPhoto RGB is it maintains the maximum amount of colour in the image. This is usually a good thing but it does require strict work flow for sharing the images.

If you know the images will only be displayed on a computer or TV screen or that they will only be printed for sharing (small prints) then it's actually better to use sRGB or Adobe RGB. This will standardize the image colour on your friends computers and it will avoid odd colour shifts.

[zenithjcoke]

Very good explanation. However, as may not be obvious just from watching this video alone, your recommendations only apply if the final result of the image is shown on printed paper and not solely online. Of course, if an image is meant for both types of viewing one could make the necessary adjustments for the online/computer monitor version using the ProPhoto RGB. However, I only want to make it clear that images using Adobe or ProPhoto RGB won't look the same when viewed online as in Photoshop

[zenithjcoke]

And of course, I just watched the Vol 2 video just after I wrote this comment.. :P Pardon me.

[gunblade64]

Fantastic explanation.

Only one problem though. I thought that Adobe Lightroom made use of the color-space "Pro-Photo" by default.

Not sRGB.

I still could be wrong though.

[morrisstudios]

@gunblade64 You could be correct. Will look into it and see if the change has been made.

[Hoogliette]

GIMP also doesn't loose that chromacity it's defined color spaces - thank you for this excellent explanation Dave

[jasoneyes01]

I wish I met you a long time ago. More videos on ICC and printer calibration please! Never could find someone explain this so well!

[antonporteus]

I liked the way you visually showed the different colour spaces. What did you use?

[LatinoSan]

Thanks!

VERY HELPFUL!

and you did a great job at explaining things!

[kadirchan]

thanks dude..awesome explanation. helped me alot! thanks again!

[ChibaCityBlues]

Actuallly it is not that simple.

Most screens i know of don't even show the complete sRGB colour space. And by calibrating the screen it even gehts worse. So you"ll end up with a huge gamut.

You won't see more colours.

The print service i use prints in sRGB. (It's one of the bests here.)

Publishing images on the web, it even gets worse. The W3C recommends sRGB as the default colour space, and most browsers ignore embedded profiles, and assume sRGB. The Result: Wrong Colours.

[eyetolduso]

Absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge!

[ChicoEdge]

Good video.

[twinsouls]

Ive read I should stick with sRGB but Im gonna try AdobeRGB and see how it goes.Thanks.

[Calbeee]

thanks for posting the video, i hope to see more video about color spaces and profiles