sRGB vs. ProPhoto

Question

I have a question regarding color space that’s been bothering me for a while that I can’t seem to find an answer to. Basically, with regard to sRGB, AdobeRGB and ProPhoto and my editing in ACR, Lightroom, Photoshop, etc. I don’t know if it matters at all switching to ProPhoto when 95% of the monitors out there are representing the sRGB gamut and a few are the AdobeRGB?

If my base assumption is wrong, then I’m happy for someone to explain, and further help me understand how it matters to have my software set to ProPhoto and edit with a monitor that at best is AdobeRGB. Naturally, I don't use sRGB for anything but exporting, so the emphasis of the question is for editing. As a side note, I recently purchased a new 4K display, and during my research I read about the sRGB vs. AdobeRGB display space, and thusly ended up purchasing an LG that has the AdobeRGB space. I have traditionally used the ProPhoto space with Photoshop EDITING. I have since switched “down” to AdobeRGB for editing as I thought MAYBE it is better if everything is adjusted to the same space.

I also understand printing may come in to play, for that my edited photographs are either exported via jpeg online, and then printed by that host via their sRGB/jpeg, or I print a TIFF file directly from Lr or Ps.

Thanks for your time and attention.

Thomas Logan

D Fosse · Accepted Answer

The main advantage of ProPhoto is that it gives you headroom in the editing process. You can work without running into gamut clipping from which you can't recover. Once a channel is clipped, that information is lost.

For final output, ProPhoto makes little sense since no output device can reproduce the full gamut. You'll need to remap anyway and the remapping needed may be very extensive.

I said in another thread that the ProPhoto gamut is mainly artificial, meaning that these extremely saturated colors are rarely found in real life. There is in fact an interesting concept known as "Pointer's gamut", which represents all real-world reflected colors from a solid object, as seen by the human eye. It happens to fit rather comfortably in Adobe RGB:

http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/articles/pointers_gamut.htm

As for monitor, a wide gamut ("Adobe RGB") unit is very useful for soft proofing, because it can reproduce virtually all printable colors - inkjet or offset. This means you can soft proof with confidence. A standard unit is considerably less useful in this respect. Everything you see on screen is already soft proofed to sRGB and a lot of printable colors are outside monitor gamut.

c.pfaffenbichler · Answer

Another thing worth keeping in mind is that when working in a large Color Space it may be beneficial to work in 16bit to avoid quantisation effects when converting to a smaller target space.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded