sRGB/Adobe RGB????

[Blue_In_AK]

What is this and why does it matter?

[CC]

1. Try the link below.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/adobe-rgb.htm

He explains it much better than my tired mind could.

Then there is http://www.steves-digicams.com/techcorner/October_2006.html
Afraid to look any further, might end up in a Mac vs PC type vortex.


Need more baby pictures. Oh I haven't check the blog yet.

[Blue_In_AK]

2. Here you go...

[CC]

3. Awwww he is so adorable.

Thank you. Now off to read about the cloth diapers.

[regnaD kciN]

5. With all due respect, Ken Rockwell is an idiot...

This is not just my opinion -- ask the professionals on a site like DPReview.com, and you'll find he gets zero respect from people who know their business. An expert at opining on everything photographic that he clearly knows nothing about (including "reviewing" equipment he's never used), Rockwell is the photography world's equivalent of Faux News Channel.

In this case, his opinion is just as screwy as ever. There's no question that AdobeRGB is a larger colorspace than the very limited sRGB. sRGB is optimized for the web, where the bandwidth to transfer images has to be restricted, and for older color monitors, whose colorspace was quite a bit smaller than what's available today.

For any display other than the web, sRGB will fall short. And, once you've shurnk the colorspace to sRGB, you can never recover the values you threw out in the process.

For what it's worth, I shoot in RAW mode (another thing Rockwell, ludicrously, claims makes "no difference"), and process my images in ProPhotoRGB, an even larger space than AdobeRGB. Then, once I have the master looking the way I want it, I export a copy, converting the image to an appropriate space for the purpose. For example, many stock libraries want AdobeRGB, so I convert from ProPhotoRGB to that colorspace while exporting through Lightroom. By the same token, when exporting for the web (including DU), I will convert to sRGB. But I'll make sure my originals remain in ProPhotoRGB.

I'm sorry if I made such a big deal about this, but Ken Rockwell is, IMHO, the biggest dispenser of bad advice in the world of photography. You're best off ignoring him completely. I'll go farther -- I suspect that if someone were to research Rockwell's advice, and always do the exact opposite from what he recommends, they'd probably be on the right track.

[dbmk]

6. As they say on the internets:

What he said.
All of it.

[ConsAreLiars]

4. Here's a short version of "color spaces," of which sRGB and Adobe RGB are two

sRGB and AdobeRGB are two ways of selecting the ranges of possible colors that are to be included in the data that define your image.

You can go to Wikipedia for more - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space

First, "color space" refers to the range of "colors" that are being included in the data. Colors are just variations in electromagnetic energy that the human eye happens to be sensitive to and thus (short version) we see.

These can be measured along 3 dimensions, most commonly Hue (which could potentially (but not particularly usefully) go out into or beyond infrared or ultraviolet.

A second is Saturation or the purity of the color - how "muddy" or grayed out is it. Again, although math and specialized instruments can go way beyond what they eye can distinguish, the color spaces might possibly be extended various lengths along this dimension as well as Hue.

The third in what is known as the HSV model is Value, or brightness. Again, although they eye has limits, math and science can go beyond those nose numbers.

Oddly enough, no color space matches up perfectly to the limits of human vision, partly because that is a highly variable target, and mostly because it is not useful, since neither a paper print nor the priciest monitor can fully reproduce anything close.

sRGB was designed to map the range of colors that can be reproduced by monitors which rely on varying the brightness of Red Green and Blue phosphors to produce images.

Paper prints have far less range.

The Wiki article has graphs that illustrate some of these various color spaces and the eye's range (limited, of course, by the extent that the monitor can show these).

Digital cameras offer AdobeRGB since the sensors can record this wider range of values than the monitor (or paper) can reproduce, which is helpful if the original scene has that range in it. You can examine the histogram in the camera to see if using sRGB means you are losing data, but there is also a cost for mathematically recording the scene in a wider color space than the colors in that scene contain. There was a recent discussion of this at: http://www.dl-c.com/board/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=40&sid=b5502efaba77b81867433fd899dd6f03uded by the numbers