LW Dail wrote in post #6451648
And I'll try Adobe RGB. I think this is my root complaint, barring my screw up with the exposure compensation. You see it in the petals where the color just goes to pot.
Just a few thoughts on Adobe RGB from "the other side of the fence". A lot of folks recommend Adobe RGB because it has a greater color range (gamut) than sRGB but you also have to be careful here to as not many applications other than your camera and Adobe Photoshop actually support Adobe RGB. If you look thru these forums (as well as other photography forums on the net) you will see a great many discussions in regards to this issue. For example people will shoot and edit in Adobe RGB but then don't understand why when they print their images or post them to the forum, they don't look the same. Obviously the problem is due to using different color profiles.
Now before anyone flames me here, let me say that YES, Adobe RGB does have a larger color gamut. I do not debate this issue. But...does everything you shoot have to have this extra color space? sRGB does a perfectly fine job for most things and it's consistant across the board. I shoot with my camera set to sRGB, PS is in sRGB, my monitor and printer profiles are all sRGB and even the two labs I go to use sRGB. In other words, what I see on my camera is generally the same thing I see thru the whole processing process and is what I see at my final output, with little or no variation. More over, I don't think I've ever had a single person look at my images and say "gee...that looks under saturated" or "gee, your saturation looks blown out...you should have used Adobe RGB". You can achieve richly saturated colors with sRGB without blowing them out.
This is just my own personal opinion as always and should only be taken as such, but to me the difference between Adobe RGB and sRGB isn't significant. When you compare the same image shot in each side by side, yes, there is a difference, but that difference is NOT huge (and can usually be made up for in other ways). For most people I think this really just falls under the whole "greed" thing as well. That mental state that tells you "you have to have the most, the biggest, the best...". Think of it this way...a lot of folks even here on POTN will never print anything bigger than a 5x7 of their prints. For all intensive purposes, this can easily be done with even a 3 or 4 megapixel p&s camera (or smaller...you can print a decent 8x10 even from a 1 megapixel), yet a great many people are under the illusion that they have to have that 10 megapixel or higher DSLR and in a few years, those same people are going to be convinced that they have to have the 15 and 20 megapixel cameras that are coming out too just to do the same thing! The same thing is true with this whole color space debate...people want (or push) Adobe RGB because it's "bigger" but the difference really isn't all that extraordinary and considering the disadvantages in the lack of support for it...again just my opinion here, but I think it's a matter of people's greed outweighing their common sense.
The last thing I would say on this matter too is simply this; when you're looking at any given image you shoot, ask yourself "Will the image really be that much better simply by using a different color space on my computer?". Using the original shot as an example here, I would have to ask myself "Would using Adobe RGB as apposed to sRGB really have made that much of a difference?". I'm not trying to be deliberately mean or rude here, but to me the color space used on the camera or in pp would be the least of my worries...the lighting looks to be really harsh, there's some sort of funky shadows in the background and to be completely honest, it's not really that interesting of a flower to begin with. I'm honestly not trying to rude with this, but the "color space" really would not have made much of a difference at all in regards to this shot. It's an ok snap shot of an average flower. There are many other aspects to photography that I would worry about before I would even begin to worry about the whole Adobe RGB versus sRGB thing and again if anything the Adobe RGB is probably going to cause more problems in your processing work flow than it will fix. I would honestly worry more about things like composition and lighting rather than the academics of color space.
Again these are just my own opinions and should be taken as such but I do hope you find some wisdom in my words and I hope they help.
Peace,
Jim
"It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment. " - Ansel Adams
Walczak Photography - www.walczakphoto.izfree.com
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