Colour space

4wd

4wd

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North York Moors
Edit My Images
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That's opened a bag of worms.

I'd been happily using sRGB throughout then saw a few comments that prophoto might be better.
Using that in lightroom all looks much the same including on flickr - but then posted an image on another site and it was horribly washed out - a new version exported in sRGB was fine.
The thing is the image I posted there was hosted on flickr where it looked normal saturation.
It seems some websites handle files differently.
 
When in doubt us sRGB. if you output to a colour space such as Pro Photo, and the software setup does not recognize the larger colourspace it will look de saturated.
Why? Well its all down to pixel values. A medium yellow in sRGB may have a yellow value of say 150. However the same yellow in Pro Photo may only have a value of say 60. This is because the Pro Photo colourspace is much larger an if working in 8 bit the the 256 increments have to be spread over a much larger area. The images look the same on your monitor, as the monitor profile within the graphics system understands this and converts them to give you the correct display. It's probable the other site is not using any colour management and is assuming everything is sRGB.

Pro Phot is a huge colourspace and there are no monitors available to handle it. It's fine for applications such as Lightroom or Photoshop, which allow you to use this colourspace as they are designed to handle it. They normally work in 16 bit colour as well. Their graphics engines will allow your image to be correctly rendered on an 8 bit monitor.

If you are posting on the web then I'd stick to sRGB . It's the most common and certainly stops confusion
 
I shoot and edit in sRGB for the reasons you have encountered - sRGB is much more universal and the standard for web. Also a lot of print labs will want sRGB files.

If you have a monitor & printer that can handle a wider colour space then you will possibly see benefits from it, otherwise stick with sRGB :)
 
As the others have said sRGB is actually fine, or you could use Adobe RGB but in all honesty I haven’t noticed much difference if anything between the two since having access to a wide gamut monitor (charts can tell you otherwise but really hard to notice in real life). Pro Photo is the default with Lightroom but not sure why, I had similar issues before I changed it to Adobe RGB and output JPEGs for web in sRGB.
 
Chances are that when the image was shared to the other site the exif/color space tag is stripped out for display there (i.e. a flickr preview on facebook).
If it's going on the web the color space should be sRGB... anything else is asking for trouble.
 
If you edit your picture in a large colour space (such as Prophoto) and then move it to a smaller colour space (i.e. when displaying on the web or printing) then either you lose those colours outside the new colour space or all the colours will be slightly adjusted to fit the new colour space. This is the difference between Perceptual (all colours adjusted) and Relative (which clips those colours outside the new colour space). Always edit in the colour space you will end up displaying in - which mostly means sRGB.
 
Lightroom ALWAYS uses ProPhoto Color space by default, regardless of the color space of the imported file - it's the way it works and you can't change it.
You choose your prefered color space when you perform your final Export from LR, the choices are ProPhoto, sRGB or Adobe RGB.
If you are going to print your image or display it on a screen, choose sRGB, since this is the standard for those operations.

There is more on the subject of color spaces here.
 
If you have a file in adobe rgb or pro photo and put on the web only the srgb colours are displayed and it will look washed out. In those instances you need to convert to srgb beforehand and all will be ok.
Most personal/home printers are srgb. Abobe rgb was designed to cover cymk which were commercial printers, magazines etc. A lot of agencies ask you to submit adobe rgb files so they can cover all uses as in certain circumstances they will be able to produce a wider gamut.
If you will only ever publish to the net or occasional printing, srgb will suffice. If there is a chance of ever going further then maybe think about a larger colour space although if you capture in raw then you will always have the original file.
 
gerry s said:
If you have a file in adobe rgb or pro photo and put on the web only the srgb colours are displayed and it will look washed out. In those instances you need to convert to srgb beforehand and all will be ok.
Most personal/home printers are srgb. Abobe rgb was designed to cover cymk which were commercial printers, magazines etc. A lot of agencies ask you to submit adobe rgb files so they can cover all uses as in certain circumstances they will be able to produce a wider gamut.
If you will only ever publish to the net or occasional printing, srgb will suffice. If there is a chance of ever going further then maybe think about a larger colour space although if you capture in raw then you will always have the original file.
Click to expand...
The point to remember is that, if your editor is working in ProPhoto you must use the "Export" command to create an sRGB file, not just "Save" the image file.
 
At this moment in time it is safest to upload an image in the sRGB colour space for display via the internet, however more browsers and applications are becoming profile aware.

It does however make sense to edit in a large colour space such as ProPhoto RGB (as already stated Lightroom uses a linear version under the bonnet), this gives you a much greater margin to work with, then when ready for output duplicate the image and convert to the smaller colour space (In Lightroom and Photoshop you can soft proof this process).

If you are printing at home then many Inkjet printers have a gamut greater than sRGB, a good profile characterising your printer, paper and ink combination will take care of things following soft proofing....
 
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