Wide Gamut Monitor Required for Excellent Prints?

Is a wide gamut monitor required to make high quality prints?

Why, or why not?

Tom,

I don't believe it is. My printer, an Epson R2880, prefers me to use AdobeRGB so thats what I have Photoshop set to import with. Anything bigger is a waste, as I'm not going to see it anyway. If printers start appearing that can use larger colour spaces, then I'd change my opinion.

TomBrooklyn wrote in post #14018280
Is a wide gamut monitor required to make high quality prints?

Why, or why not?

Wide gamut monitors have been available for only a couple years. Saying they are required would imply that no high quality prints were made before then. They do make it easier to predict what a print from a quality inkjet will look like; you can eyeball it more and need to depend less on the OOG warning in the soft print tool. But you must also remember that something like 95% (don't remember the exact number) of colors in the gamut of a wide gamut monitor are also displayed on a conventional monitor and in the majority of photos that extra 5% isn't present in the subject. Sometimes they are artificial colors that have been created in the editing, which can be a good thing or can be abused. The differences are mostly in the area of green-cyan, colors that are important to landscapists, for instance, but not very many of them want to print electric foliage.

TomBrooklyn wrote in post #14018280
Is a wide gamut monitor required to make high quality prints?

Why, or why not?

The direct answer to your question is no. When you send a print to the printer, it does not go through the monitor, adapt to the monitor's colors, then go to the printer. It goes straight from the PC to the printer.

So if you are able to edit effectively on a lower-quality monitor and still achieve good prints, it will work.

A more appropriate question would be is a wide gamut monitor required to perform good post processing. Again, it is not required, but it helps.

The differences I see in my good panel monitors (such as the dell u2410) and the other piece of crap 6-bit TN panels I have around here is enormous.
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No. A calibrated monitor is, because otherwise you are guessing at what the printed output will be like. I use a relatively inexpensive Dell U2311H (calibrated), and it's just fine. I would get an IPS (?) rather than a TN monitor, in part because the latter changes appearance quickly as you move from perfectly positioned.

A wide gamut monitor better allows you to visualize the wide gamut of colors available in the extended color space of aRGB.
Most commercial photographic printers cannot accept aRGB files, and most (if they accept aRGB) will convert the file to the narrower color gamut of sRGB before printing!
Many home inkjet printers can print aRGB gamut, so if you have an extended gamut monitor, you potentially can better pre-visualize the gamut which will be produced by your home printer -- but you need to calibrate your printer and monitor so their profiles both are in synch with one another.

Wilt wrote in post #14021437
Most commercial photographic printers cannot accept aRGB files, and most (if they accept aRGB) will convert the file to the narrower color gamut of sRGB before printing!
Many home inkjet printers can print aRGB gamut, so if you have an extended gamut monitor, you potentially can better pre-visualize the gamut which will be produced by your home printer -- but you need to calibrate your printer and monitor so their profiles both are in synch with one another.

If most commercial printers use sRGB, does that mean the average photo hobbyest is likely to be able to make better prints at home? Or are they likely to need a wide gamut monitor to do so?

How about calibrating the monitor, but using the supplied ICC profiles for the printer and paper? Most monitor calibrators cost in the $100-$200 range; but printer profilers cost about double that.

TomBrooklyn wrote in post #16032830
If most commercial printers use sRGB, does that mean the average photo hobbyest is likely to be able to make better prints at home?

Yes, I believe that's the case, depending on the quality of the printer of course.

TomBrooklyn wrote in post #16032830
If most commercial printers use sRGB, does that mean the average photo hobbyest is likely to be able to make better prints at home? Or are they likely to need a wide gamut monitor to do so?

That very much depends on the content of the photo. A portrait contains no colors than are not included in sRGB. Most average subjects have a range of colors that even if there are a few colors that are beyond sRGB, they are not significant. And when the native subject gamut is not much larger than sRGB there is a certain advantage to using sRGB rather than Adobe RGB. But if the subject gamut is wide enough to utilize the Adobe RGB gamut (which is larger than sRGB primarily in the greens, so we are mostly talking about landscapes) a good inkjet will certainly do better. In fact many inkjets have a gamut greater than Adobe RGB and if the subject colors are beyond Adobe RGB (red, orange or yellow flowers, for instance) it would be worthwhile to feed them images in ProPhoto RGB or Wide Gamut RGB. And in both these cases it would not be essential but it would be an advantage to have a wide gamut monitor. Both because you can better control the editing of those colors if you can see them and also because the soft proofing will be better.

Obviously a profile specific to a given machine will be better than a canned profile from the manufacturer, but if you stick to the maker's paper, the supplied profiles are fairly good. And if you want to go to a different paper, custom profiles can be purchased for $25-30.

You don't need a wide gamut monitor to create high quality prints. IMO many people that buy wide gamut monitors are making a big mistake:

- you need to have a better understanding of color spaces and how color managed applications work
- many commonly used applications are not color managed causing a lot of confusion or frustration if the user lacks the above knowledge

I used a standard gamut monitor for several years and tried my best to learn about color management and color aware applications prior to moving to wide gamut. Even then I didn't really have to go that route, but I enjoy geeking around with this stuff.

Since aRGB merely reassigns the identical 16.7Million digital values to a somewhat different set of hues (shades of color), in order to get more shades of green, some other color(s) has to be somehow shortchanged!

It makes you wonder what got shortchanged, in order to free up some of the 16.7Million values to be used for green. And if something got shortchanged, is aRGB really and truly 'better' than sRGB, or merely deficient in a different manner than sRGB?!

If you really think about it, ya gotta wonder!

Wilt wrote in post #16033566
It makes you wonder what got shortchanged, in order to free up some of the 16.7Million values to be used for green. And if something got shortchanged, is aRGB really and truly 'better' than sRGB, or merely deficient in a different manner than sRGB?!

Very well said!

One approach to working with colors using a "consumer" monitor is to make use of Soft Proofing using the "out-of-gamut warning" and use the software to "tone down" the colors that aren't behaving. Yes, you will sacrifice some of the wide-gamut advantage, but on the other hand you will be able to tame the image to be closer to what gets printed.

Picture North Carolina wrote in post #14019515
The differences I see in my good panel monitors (such as the dell u2410) and the other piece of crap 6-bit TN panels I have around here is enormous.

I didn't mean to compare wide-gamut monitors with 6-bit TN ones. I meant to compare them to the 8-bit IPS panel monitor variety--the kind that are widely used by many professional and advanced amateur photographers.