Another color range question

Question

Recently, I’ve been editing in sRGB for several reasons: (1) If I want to distribute my images electronically, people will view those images mostly in sRGB or in whatever color space is set in their monitor. In most cases, that is likely to be something closer to sRGB than to any other color space. (2) I never have felt that there were colors I wanted but couldn’t get working in sRGB. And modifying colors using simple hue and saturation adjustments and the like is not problematic. Given that I work often with nature scenes that include very gradual transitions (mists and the like), I do sometimes encounter banding. Using 16 bits with a narrower color range (sRGB) tends to minimize that problem. Does that make sense?

D Fosse · Accepted Answer

Yes, I understand what you're saying. I just phrase my replies in general terms for the benefit of anyone else who might be reading.

ProPhoto has more drawbacks than advantages. I avoid it as much as I can. There is no free lunch, and the huge gamut has a price: areas of low saturation are very compressed in RGB numbers - particularly obvious in shadow values where it can be very difficult to identify and correct shadow color casts, or indeed make precise adjustments to the black level in general.

There is a widespread notion that the more saturation the merrier, and that ProPhoto is therefore "better". The problem is that if you edit in ProPhoto, your file will very quickly end up with lots of colors that can never be reproduced anywhere. But sooner or later you have to output your file, and then you get into real trouble! You'll have ugly clipping all around. Remapping a ProPhoto file that has been edited without any checks along the way can be a nightmare. Better to control it early on so it doesn't get completely out of hand.

In short, ProPhoto has a big potential for destruction. Handle with care.

My preferred working color space is Adobe RGB. It's large enough for anything ever practically needed, and fairly easy to remap as needed.

D Fosse · Answer

If you're working with 16 bit data, any banding you see is in your display system.

The monitor is the 8 bit bottleneck here, and there are several links in the display chain that can introduce banding: Calibration adjustments in the video card, the monitor profile, the panel itself. Banding is cumulative, so with all these laid on top of each other it can become more pronounced.

Remember that 8 bit color depth inherently has visible banding. The eye can separate 256 discrete levels.

sRGB is often big enough for most practical purposes. Good color is not about maxing out the saturation, it's about color relationships. If you can't get it to work in sRGB, it may be that you should blame yourself rather than the color space 😉

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