P: Add full support for external editing in Rec2020 (critical for HDR and ideal for print)

Forum|Forum|10 months ago
March 31, 2025
48 replies
3807 views

The Rec2020 colorspace (aka ITU-R BT.2020) is a critical colorspace for photography and not well supported in Lightroom Classic.

Rec2020 is the preferred colorspace for HDR (and is LRC's working primaries when in HDR mode). Rec2020 is also very ideal for print-related work as it includes many printable colors which fall outside Adobe RGB / P3, and yet avoids the excess of ProPhoto (which includes many imaginary values outside the range of human vision).

You cannot use it via any "edit in" options to open your image in Photoshop, which is especially important for working with RAW Smart Objects. The colorspace options in LRC preferences / external editing are limited to ProPhoto, Adobe RGB, P3, and sRGB.

This would ideally be done as a "JDI", as both LRC and PS support Rec2020, we simply don't have the option in the colorspace dropdown for external editing.

Note that there is limited support now in the "export" pathway (you can select file settings / color space = "rec 2020"). We just need a way to offer the same colorspace options for external editing.

Sameer K

Community Manager

Hello everyone,

The MAX release for Adobe Photography products includes an update addressing the requested feature.

If the update isn’t visible in your Creative Cloud app, refresh it using [Ctrl/Cmd] + [Alt/Opt] + [R].

Please note: It may take up to 24 hours for the update to appear.

Thank you for your continued patience.

Kevin Stohlmeyer

Community Expert

Locking this post. There is an internal ticket submitted for this request. In the future please upvote the original post do not cut and paste replies as that can be interpreted as spam.

T

Tony_TLJ

Participant

Please add external editing support for Rec2020. It is crital for the growth of HDR

J

johnw62868647

Participant

Tine to make HDR the standard of the photo editing industry!!!

F

FSt0p

Inspiring

Hi.

Can you explain why you need it from the practical standpoint?

Apart from "we need it" from people who are obviously watched some of your videos, I don't see why it's so needed.

And honesly those copy/pasted messages just looks like nothing else but spam.
So what's wrong with ProPhoto RGB?

Here is gamut comparison of various color spaces:

ProPhoto is wider than Rec2020, so can encode all colors that can be encoded in Rec2020.
Why not just use "Edit In Photoshop" with ProPhoto colorspace, and than in PS convert to anything you like including Rec2020?