ProPhoto colour space. Would you use it?

[arcon5]

So its said ProPhoto contains a wider gamut of colours so accuracy of photo to print would naturally increase. But with most printers not recognising ProPhoto would you really use it?

I had a photographer in about 6 weeks ago whose image was ProPhoto & because its not installed on my HP printers it was converted to sRGB and therefore affected colours.

So do printers generally accept other colour spaces other than the usual Adobe RGB or sRGB? And even if it does have a wider gamut would you bother using it?

 

[DemiLion]

There's a rather good quote about ProPhoto from Luminous Landscape that rather fits in nicely here:

But, on the other hand, an image file in a wide space such as ProPhoto RGB needs to be kept in a cage, so that it doesn't accidentally get into the outside world. Anyone receiving a copy of such a file who doesn't know what they have, and who doesn't function in a properly colour managed workflow, or who presumes that the file is sRGB, can inadvertently use it to produce some really horrid results.

and no that's not a pop at you!

I only use it transfer between LR3 ->PS and back again (which is the default setup) outputting in sRGB, but to be honest I'm not really likely to see the benefit on my monitor anyway.

The full article is here:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/prophoto-rgb.shtml

My gut feeling would be to question whether you'd actually see any benefit at all when printing to canvas, even if you were set up for it, and that lab use of ProPhoto would be a fairly specialised area.

 

[18%grey]

I changed over to ProPhoto when I found out my printer supported it. It makes sense to use the widest gamut you can print.
I must admit it can be a pain having to then convert the files to AdobeRGB when exporting them.

 

[POAH]

your moniter certainly won't be able to show the gamut and when you post a pic on the web it would look pants lol. I only use adobe RGB for printing and sRGB for posting to web.

Although the thing about the printer is that the colour management is more than likely being controlled by photoshop so as long as the paper/ink combo can handle the gamut then there should be no problem using it.

I'll give it a go at the weekend for a laugh

 

[snappingsam]

Your printer won't be able to print it
Your monitor won't be able to show it

So if you can't see it, and you can't print it, why work in it?

 

[POAH]

Ive just done a quick test using the out of gamut warning in the print dialogue box using prophoto colour space.

a few profiles did not have the gamut all my matt profiles, harman crystal jet gloss but epson premium gloss, kirkland gloss, fotospeed satin were fine.

 

[Chappers]

Here's a link to an article by Jeff Schewe on exactly this subject

http://schewephoto.com/sRGB-VS-PPRGB/.

To be honest I wouldn't bother using ProPhoto, If you had a monitor that could resolve it the fine, and only a very few printers can handle the full colour gamut.

Keep the files as RAW and then if we ever get monitors and printers that can handle the full colour bandwidth of ProPhoto then you could use it. ( But don't hold your breath on that )

 

[RicherSea]

At the moment there is no reason at all to use ProPhoto, and a good reason not to. If you store or transmit your images in a high gamut space you are gaining gamut at the expense of colour discrimination since you only have a finite number of data values to use in the image (either 2^16 or 2^8 depending on whether you are in an 8bit or 16bit file).

Since no-on can print or view the ProPhoto gamut, the picture ends up being converted at some stage or other, and you get the gamut of sRGB or Adobe RGB, with the colour discrimination of ProPhoto, so the worst of both worlds.

Keep the RAW if you may want to support some future high gamut display technology, but I'd never send anything other than sRGB or adobeRGB to a printer, unless that will take a LAB colour space which doesn't suffer from any gamut/profile problems.

 

[Mark.A]

I use Prophoto in LR and CS5 for editing and convert to sRGB for output. Reason is because Prophoto gives you the most data to work with. It's the same reason I always use 16-bit images for editing and convert to 8-bit for output.

 

[POAH]

I printed 3 images sRGB, RGB and pro photo. all converted from a raw in 15 bit format. there was no difference I could make out at normal viewing distance and even looking closely I could not see anything different.


images were printed on Epson traditional photo paper with a custom profile.

 

[Hodders]

As a previous poster has said. I use prophoto everywhere when moving images between colour managed applications. I work on a U2410 monitor and I do see the extra gamut. Export from LR is when I go back to sRGB or the printers colour space.

 

[Mark.A]

I printed 3 images sRGB, RGB and pro photo. all converted from a raw in 15 bit format. there was no difference I could make out at normal viewing distance and even looking closely I could not see anything different.


images were printed on Epson traditional photo paper with a custom profile.

You wouldn't see a difference. The idea in using Prophoto is to have more data to work with whilst editing, not in the final image. Where it makes a real difference is in editing images with a lot of colour graduation. If you do a lot of editing to an image (adjusting colours, etc.) then you can find things like skies start to get colour banding in them (which is caused by the lower colour gamut), using Prophoto whilst editing helps reduce/avoid this.

 

[Mark.A]

Just did these images as a quick example of the difference Prophoto can make. It's a silly example but you should be able to see the difference in using Prophoto for editing.

This is the original image:

I took the above image into photoshop (using the sRGB colorspace), did a hue/saturation layer and set the cyan channel to +32 on the hue and the blue channel to +42 on the hue. Merged the layer and saved to jpeg.

That editing gave me this:

Again, I took the original image into photoshop but this time using the Prophoto colorspace and performed the exact same edit.

That editing gave me this:

I'll let you decide for yourself if there's a difference.