One Stop Under

Another great article from The Luminous Landscape, this one is about understanding ProPhoto RGB.

Most photographers work under the assumption that Adobe RGB 98 is the most suitable working space within Photoshop. Everyone also knows that the sRGB working space is smaller, and therefore less suitable for professional and fine-art printing applications. Sure, sRGB is fine for amateurs and the web, but real men use Adobe RGB – right?

Well, not really.

ProPhoto RGB is a much larger color space than those most often used by photographers - sRGB and Adobe RGB 98. For a serious photographer, this can mean you preserve more of your original image’s colors through more of your editing process, and then only clipping your color space in the final image when you output it for printing or display.

Using ProPhotoRGB is analagous to using 16-bit color to preserve the subtle tones and color range while you’re working on an image, and only converting back to 8-bit color for printing. Doing drastic edits on an 8-bit image can result in quantised histograms and banding in your output. Doing those edits on a 16-bit image and downsampling to 8-bit at the end avoids these problems.

There are caveats to using ProPhoto RGB, however. You need to be conscious of the fact that your working color space is much larger than printers or monitors can output. If much of your image lies in these ‘out of gamut’ areas of the color space, you could end up with weird colors or large areas of fully-saturated color in your final print.

Filed under: Color Management, RAW Files

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