sRGB vs Adobe RGB

in camera setting; post and adjust in aRGB then conver for print/output into sRGB.

I believe it has a larger color depth sort of like a baloon that has more air in it has the same colors but more volume. Well thats what i've learned at least.

EOSMan said:

Please look at the two side by side pictures and give me your
opinion on which one looks the best based on color and detail.

Both pictures were processed the same with Photoshop CS except one
was brought in as sRGB and the other as Adobe RGB.

I'm trying to decide whether to use sRGB or Adobe RGB.

Never mind the subject please, I was just looking for something
with allot of color in it.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

I'll try to make this palatable, but I'm an engineer. ;^)

Real short: If you are shooting in JPEG, and your photos are destined for prints or the web, shoot in sRGB. If your client needs Adobe RGB, use that. Don’t mix the two.

A little longer: The sRGB color space was designed for the “average” non-color-aware application/monitor/adapter combination. The intent is to make the colors look “right” with something like Internet Explorer. It’s humble beginnings don’t mean that it’s not a valid color space. It encompasses a larger gamut that most printers can print.

The color values in a JPEG file run from 0 to 255. These are whole numbers. 0 is darkest, 255 is brightest. A red value of 255 in an sRGB file means “as red as the monitor can make it”. Because Adobe RGB covers a larger gamut, the same red would have a value of about 219. With Adobe RGB, a value of 219 means “as red as the monitor can make it”. Adobe RGB can represent colors a lot redder. (or greener, or bluer)

Because of this mismatch, if you have an sRGB picture with a smooth transition from black to bright red, there would be 256 different colors, from 0 to 255 (ignoring the values for green and blue). The same color range in Adobe RGB would have only 220 colors (0 to 219). 36 of those shades of red would be converted to the nearest neighbor. I believe the visual effect is known as “posterization”.

So, it’s not how big your gamut is, it’s what you do with it. Unless a client needs the Adobe color space, there is no point in trying to represent colors you can’t display. You will have better color fidelity from camera to print (or screen) with sRGB.

Dave

Could we have the images saved in two separate files with the working profile embedded with each.

Do this before any other processing is done to the images....do not color correct either of the images.

-----
http://www.pbase.com/richo/
'Life is a dance, Love is the music.'

...what do you mean by "RGB"? You mean Adobe RGB?

Thanks,
JT

Leo Reinhard said:

EOSMan said:

Please look at the two side by side pictures and give me your
opinion on which one looks the best based on color and detail.

Both pictures were processed the same with Photoshop CS except one
was brought in as sRGB and the other as Adobe RGB.

I'm trying to decide whether to use sRGB or Adobe RGB.

Never mind the subject please, I was just looking for something
with allot of color in it.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

--
Leo P R

SMILE

Click to expand...

--
To over-expose is human...

Yiannis said:

Dont know why ACDSee doesnt support it.

Click to expand...

speed, it takes some time to do correct color managment.

thomas

hope this helps you
http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/1133

I did some work on old files yeasterday, I had been having problems getting the colour balance right on my 1Ds. I did some conversions in Adobe RGB and although they came into PS looking less saturatedafter a touch of sat and a touch of contrast I'm convinced they are nearer the mark and have slightly more detail( you seem to be able to push the unsharp mask up a touch more.) The colours before just looked unreal and took a hell of a lot of work to bring back in line.
Well that's my findings(perhaps I'm willing it to be better?)

I'll do some more comparisons but there isn't any point posting low res files on the web(IMHO)

It's not a massive gap but I can see it. I'm using a new 21" dot pitch 20 monitor.

--
Dave C

you don't judge whether or not to use aRGB vs sRGB by looking at it on a monitor....this is a color space... sRGB should always look better on a monitor because it was designed for the monitor. But if you are going to a commericial printer, you shoot in adobe RGB.

The Apple ColorSync Utility shows excellent 3-d views of color spaces of your various profiles. You can turn the xyz-graphic as you like and study it from any angle.
This illustrates the color gamut of adobeRGB:



Here is sRGB from the same angle:



AdobeRGB from opposite direction:



And same with sRGB:



We see that adobeRGB cover more green and red/orange tones.
Here is a visualization of a Color LCD monitor gamut:



And the gamut of Canon s9000 printer profile:



Both the printer and monitor is more like sRGB. That means that a color in an aRGB photo outside the monitor's gamut is converted/changed mathematically to another color when you convert to sRGB, but when showing an aRGB photo on a monitor without converting, the colors are clipped, which makes it look a bitt flat or dull. Please correct me if I an wrong.
Hans

EOSMan said:

Please look at the two side by side pictures and give me your
opinion on which one looks the best based on color and detail.

Both pictures were processed the same with Photoshop CS except one
was brought in as sRGB and the other as Adobe RGB.

I'm trying to decide whether to use sRGB or Adobe RGB.

Never mind the subject please, I was just looking for something
with allot of color in it.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Sorry for late reply- been working a lot. Yes I mean Adobe RGB.

J Thompson said:

Thanks,
JT

Leo Reinhard said:

EOSMan said:

Please look at the two side by side pictures and give me your
opinion on which one looks the best based on color and detail.

Both pictures were processed the same with Photoshop CS except one
was brought in as sRGB and the other as Adobe RGB.

I'm trying to decide whether to use sRGB or Adobe RGB.

Never mind the subject please, I was just looking for something
with allot of color in it.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

--
Leo P R

SMILE

Click to expand...

--
To over-expose is human...

Click to expand...

--
Leo P R

SMILE

I think that the problem is that the images are not being viewed correctly. I took your image into Photoshop and split the left and right. The left image I assigned a profile of aRGB. After doing that the two look about the same.

I assume that what is happening is that your aRGB images are being viewed in sRGB or your monitor's colorspace causing them to have duller colors.

Bill

EOSMan said:

I don't think I made any mistakes that I'm aware of.
The picture was shot in RAW mode and the only thing I did in
Photoshop CS was select Adobe RGB for the photo on the left and
loading the image again and selected sRGB for the picture on the
right. Using sRGB causes the colors to appear more saturated. It
does seem like the Adode RGB gives you a little more detail but the
colors are duller.

Thanks for your feedback.

Click to expand...

So you combined two images, one from the sRGB colorspace and one from the Adobe RGB colorspace, but in what colorspace is that composite image? sRGB? Won't that have the effect of muting the Adobe RGB section of the composite image?

EOSMan said:

I don't think I made any mistakes that I'm aware of.

Click to expand...

The fact that they don't look the same proves that you made a mistake.

EOSMan said:

The picture was shot in RAW mode and the only thing I did in
Photoshop CS was select Adobe RGB for the photo on the left and
loading the image again and selected sRGB for the picture on the
right.

Click to expand...

EOSMan said:

Using sRGB causes the colors to appear more saturated. It
does seem like the Adode RGB gives you a little more detail but the
colors are duller.

Click to expand...

Only if you view Adobe RGB images in an application that doesn't know the image is Adobe RGB, i.e., if you view an Adobe RGB image under the assumption that it's sRGB.

--
Ron Parr
FAQ: http://www.cs.duke.edu/~parr/photography/faq.html
Gallery: http://www.pbase.com/parr/

Yiannis said:

If I attempt to load a aRGB image lets say with ACDSEE (Which
doesnt support aRGB), then the image does look quite dull. Funny
thing is, their editing program called fotocanvas,or is it
fotoslate, (It comes with ACDSEE 6.0) supports both sRGB, and aRGB.

Click to expand...

The new ACDSee 7 does support full colour management.

Mountain Dave said:

Because of this mismatch, if you have an sRGB picture with a smooth
transition from black to bright red, there would be 256 different
colors, from 0 to 255 (ignoring the values for green and blue).
The same color range in Adobe RGB would have only 220 colors (0 to
219). 36 of those shades of red would be converted to the nearest
neighbor. I believe the visual effect is known as “posterization”.

Click to expand...

You'd get posterization if you tried to adjust the levels on an Adobe RGB shot and stretched things out so far that you could see the steps between the colors. Of course, this can happen with sRGB too, but you'll need to push an sRGB file harder before ou see it. (Of course we're talking about 8 bit here.)

For an 8 bit Adobe RGB file viewed on a monitor without pushing of levels, you just won't notice that you have fewer fine distinctions between the less saturated colors.

--
Ron Parr
FAQ: http://www.cs.duke.edu/~parr/photography/faq.html
Gallery: http://www.pbase.com/parr/

Kevin Harms said:

For most cases use sRGB No desktop printer can even print all the
colors of sRGB let alone Adobe RGB Most pro portrait labs also want
files as sRGB . Look here if you need more info.
http://www.shootsmarter.com/infocenter/wc025.html

Click to expand...

That unfortunate article leads to many misconceptions.

The fact is that Adobe RGB contains many printable colors not contained in sRGB and that with appropriate software you can enjoy the benefit of these colors.

This has been a well known fact for many years and such technologies as Print Image Matching (P.I.M.) at later exifprint were developed to address this. See page 6:

http://files.support.epson.com/pdf/600q__/600q__ti.pdf

More on exif print:

http://www.cipa.jp/exifprint/contents_e/01exif4_e.html

--
Ron Parr
FAQ: http://www.cs.duke.edu/~parr/photography/faq.html
Gallery: http://www.pbase.com/parr/

Hans Ree said:

Both the printer and monitor is more like sRGB. That means that a
color in an aRGB photo outside the monitor's gamut is
converted/changed mathematically to another color when you convert
to sRGB, but when showing an aRGB photo on a monitor without
converting, the colors are clipped, which makes it look a bitt flat
or dull. Please correct me if I an wrong.

Click to expand...

An 8 bit sRGB file and an 8 bit Adobe RGB file will both have numbers ranging from 0 to 255. If you view an Adobe RGB file with an application that thinks that the file is sRGB, the colors will look dull, but not because of clipping. The colors will look dull bcause the program is incorrectly interpreting what the numbers in the file mean.

If you convert an Adobe RGB file to sRGB and then view it in sRGB, it will look pretty much the same as if you had started with an sRGB file in the first place.

--
Ron Parr
FAQ: http://www.cs.duke.edu/~parr/photography/faq.html
Gallery: http://www.pbase.com/parr/

But then I post process a ton in photoshop and I have found aRGB at 16 bit gives me more room to make a picture pop. And if you print to a rgb printer is shows, also if you intend to go to a commerical printer it certainly helps to have the extra color range as cmyk printing tends to condence color and loose detail.
Bob

I calibrated my monitor with Colorvision Spyder and use the default profile after calibration after conversion from RAW.

My question: is the color depth of this calibrated profile superior/or inferior to Adobe RBG or sRGB? BTW, the on-screen images using this profile are definitely superior than any standard profiles available in windows.

is not in viewing on a monitor but in the printed piece.

Having been in the commerical printing business for more years than I care to think about (long before digital) I have found aRGB to be the better color space to work in and print from. That being said, to most print buyers they are uable to see a difference between the output of the two so most people could care less.
Bob