Adobe RGB vs. sRGB for printing

Assuming a properly managed colorspace...Would switching to Adobe RGB (RAW) improve phtolab prints of photographs I take? Would it adversely the resulting sRGB renders I make for web/tablet/PC use?

Is a properly calibrated sRGB dispay enough to give you a good proofing of what an Adobe RGB photo would look like on paper?

The easy answer is that moving to Adobe RGB for your capture will make no difference at all to your final prints if you are using a photolab and are submitting images in line with their requirements.

The reason for this is that 99% of all labs that I know request that you submit in sRGB as this is what they print. Printing Adobe RGB required wide gamut inks and is just not something that most commercial labs will bother with.

A sRGB display cannot show the gamut of colours that are present in aRGB so it will not provide an accurate proofing.

Keep in mind that Adobe RGB won't improve at all a picture that fits entirely into the sRGB space.

By using a wider color space than the image actually requires, you are making available an additional set of colors which the image has no use for - at the expense of the number of available color shades within the gamut region that the image is feeding from.

If you are using an external print "lab" for your prints, I'd always advise to check with them (assuming they have a knowledgeable staff) as to what color space they work with, and then you can "fine-tune" your edits accordingly. Now, "most" images will "play well" in both sRGB and aRGB, but if you are dealing with bright/saturated colors, then there can be a difference. Soft Proofing can really come in handy, either using a profile specific to the printer/paper/ink, provided by your vendors, or, if it comes down to it, go with the "safe" sRGB profile...

For displaying on a consumer monitor/software, sRGB is definitely the safe option.

For printing directly from Photoshop (or Lightroom), assuming you have an up-to-date photo printer and profiles provided by your printer driver that your software can use, well, aRGB can work fine, although it can take a bit of trial-and-error to work out any discrepancies!

Nightstalker wrote in post #16807242
The easy answer is that moving to Adobe RGB for your capture will make no difference at all to your final prints if you are using a photolab and are submitting images in line with their requirements.

The reason for this is that 99% of all labs that I know request that you submit in sRGB as this is what they print. Printing Adobe RGB required wide gamut inks and is just not something that most commercial labs will bother with.

What "level" of photo lab do I need access to for wide gamut printing? I'm wary of DIY due to the cost of inks—I don't plan on printing enough photos to keep the ink wet.

dpyro wrote in post #16807174
Assuming a properly managed colorspace...Would switching to Adobe RGB (RAW) improve phtolab prints of photographs I take? Would it adversely the resulting sRGB renders I make for web/tablet/PC use?

Is a properly calibrated sRGB dispay enough to give you a good proofing of what an Adobe RGB photo would look like on paper?

I have personally noticed an improvement in kicking out my images in AdobeRGB with where I take my prints to. I make a separate export in sRGB if that image is being used or viewed on a computer or tablet.

AdobeRGB is great if you have green in your image. If there is little in the green channel, there will not be much of a difference at all.

You should really always use the colour profile that is reccomended by the lab for the particular printer system/paper type combination that you are going to use. A GOOD pro level lab should be able to give you the correct information for every option they offer. Most labs offering prints to consumers will use sRGB these days, as that is the standard colour profile that the output from most PnS cameras will have. Those customers have zero knowlege of colour spaces and would not know how/have the software to convert them anyway. The lab I use here in the UK offers that option, and will allow you to set the crop for aspect ratio etc.

They also have a pro option that does no processing/colour management. This requires you to download the correct .icc profile for the printer/paper and use that (although sRGB is generally close enough for many people). This allows one to soft proof for each print you are making, and using it the colours are generally very consistent between print and screen. If nothing is out of gamut then the colours are also a good match across different media/processes. I have done same sized prints on both gloss Fuji Crystal Archive paper on a Frontier machine, and a canvas. The colours are almost identical, within the differences caused by the media in percived saturation.

Your working colour space may well be defined by the software one is using. My workflow is LR 4 based, with some images also going to PSCS5 for additional work. Internally LR uses a variation of ProPhotoRGB, which is a colour space that really only works in 16 bit colour depth. I export to PS in 16 bit ProPhotoRGB and leave it that way as all the images go back to LR for final output. Converting from a smaller colour space to a larger one, especially when then doing some manipulation and then converting back again is possible to have a detrimental effect on colours, mostly noticeable in fine colour gradations. Images are exported from LR converted to which ever colour space is apropriate for the intended use of the image. This means my images are normally only going to go through on colour space conversion.

If I am generating images directly in PS with no intention of bringing them into LR then I will also use a colour space suited to the final use of that image. If as is often the case that will be the web I will use sRGB, although the total "size" of the colour space is smaller that simply means that the difference between the shades of colour are smaller, with the same potential 16 million odd colours (in an 8 bit case) being closer together. This offers the potential advantage of smoother colour gradients. Which may be useful when JPEG file compression is introduced.

Alan

Andrew Rodney - Digital Dog said on a forum many years ago to work in aRGB because every printer is different. You don't know how much a printer can actually go outside he sRGB colour gamut. Before saving the image PS you "convert to profile" in PS. So my camera has been on aRGB since. I believe he was taking about printers at home.

Most of my stuff that is printed these days is PP in LR. Either way what Alan said is the best thing to do when sending to a lab. I don't actually print so I just select sRGB and media type when exporting for my customers but every customers needs are different.

His book is pretty good.

http://digitaldog.net

Correction. I don't actually print "anymore". When I did print I did not have LR so I followed that procedure. When I "converted to profile" it would be from aRGB to sRGB. I don't think that LR can do that. At least I have never looked to see if it can.

digital paradise wrote in post #16809521
Andrew Rodney - Digital Dog said on a forum many years ago to work in aRGB because every printer is different. You don't know how much a printer can actually go outside he sRGB colour gamut. Before saving the image PS you "convert to profile" in PS. So my camera has been on aRGB since. I believe he was taking about printers at home.

Most of my stuff that is printed these days is PP in LR. Either way what Alan said is the best thing to do when sending to a lab. I don't actually print so I just select sRGB and media type when exporting for my customers but every customers needs are different.

His book is pretty good.

http://digitaldog.net

This is all very good, but even more important. You can easily convert from AdobeRGB without a loss, but you cannot convert from sRGB without a loss. So AdobeRGB is always a safe bet and gives you more options in the future without losing information.

Printing FAQ. Covered near the end (I just wrote the color space bit).

Adharr wrote in post #16810414
This is all very good, but even more important. You can easily convert from AdobeRGB without a loss, but you cannot convert from sRGB without a loss. So AdobeRGB is always a safe bet and gives you more options in the future without losing information.

Let's be more precise.

Suppose you took a raw of a scene that fits entirely into the sRGB color space. If, at conversion, you save the picture to sRGB, it will contain a higher number of colors than if saved to AdobeRGB (about 30% more on average, according to a test I made).

The conversion from AdobeRGB to sRGB itself may be lossless indeed (if we ignore the small color shifts happening due to the two color digitization grids not being exactly superimposed), but the color resolution loss, suffered with the initial saving to AdobeRGB, is carried over to the sRGB version.

In short, such an image will contain a higher number of colors if saved straight to sRGB than being taken the AdobeRGB > sRGB route.

agedbriar wrote in post #16811141
Let's be more precise.

Suppose you took a raw of a scene that fits entirely into the sRGB color space. If, at conversion, you save the picture to sRGB, it will contain a higher number of colors than if saved to AdobeRGB (about 30% more on average, according to a test I made).

The conversion from AdobeRGB to sRGB itself may be lossless indeed (if we ignore the small color shifts happening due to the two color digitization grids not being exactly superimposed), but the color resolution loss, suffered with the initial saving to AdobeRGB, is carried over to the sRGB version.

In short, such an image will contain a higher number of colors if saved straight to sRGB than being taken the AdobeRGB > sRGB route.

This is exactly correct. What I said only applies if you are trapped into shooting in JPG only and only have a choice between sRGB and AdobeRGB. And also remember that AdobeRGB really shines if there is a lot of data in the green channel.

digital paradise wrote in post #16809541
Correction. I don't actually print "anymore". When I did print I did not have LR so I followed that procedure. When I "converted to profile" it would be from aRGB to sRGB. I don't think that LR can do that. At least I have never looked to see if it can.

When working with RAW's in LR you are working in LR's own internal colour space Mellissa, a variant of ProPhotoRGB. It is only when you export from LR that you have to worry about choosing a colour space. Most of the export presets that are avilable have sRGB as the default colour space. LR4 at least will not only correctly tag the colour space for you, but also embbed that profile in the image. I found that out when I had an issue with a zero quality 800×600 JPEG file that would not go below 1Mb in file size. I had accidentally managed to change the colour profile to a printer one, and the profile was taking up all the space. Switched to sRGB it was about 10 Kb in size.

As about 90% of my images only now need processing in LR, and I always shoot RAW, my images only get fixed to a colour space when they are exported, and every export gets the correct colour space for the use that will be made of it. Even the images that round trip to PS are done so in the optimum format for the future use that will be made of them, further processing in LR.

Alan

Adharr wrote in post #16811229
This is exactly correct. What I said only applies if you are trapped into shooting in JPG only and only have a choice between sRGB and AdobeRGB. And also remember that AdobeRGB really shines if there is a lot of data in the green channel.

Shure.

I'm not opposed to using a wider color space when the image requires it and benefits from that.

What I'm advocating is the choice of CS based on image content.