Woah, leave you guys alone for a day and all heck breaks loose :lol:
Seriously, thanks Victoria, Jon and Ken, I've learned some more.
It appears that some of my comments have added fuel to debate (confusion?) between Victoria's and Jon's comments. To summarize and clarify where my (newb) position is between both of them:
The spirit of my original question was: given I'm shooting mostly RAW (which renders the decision of which color space to use in-camera a non-decision), what bearing does my choice of color space (in-camera) have when I'm evaluating exposure via histograms (again, in camera).
Victoria provided observations that using the Adobe space in-camera would render slightly more accurate histograms that would also more closely match what I would see in LR.
That said, I did start moving the conversation a bit from camera to PP, specifically:
...I'm better off shooting in Adobe in-camera instead of sRGB (remembering that I'll have to convert back to sRGB on export rather than rely on profiles) to get a better idea of exposure in the field.
That said, given most of my work will be for the web and will therefore be exported as sRGB, I'm wondering if I'm maybe better off leaving my camera set to sRGB to evaluate exposure?
I realize that the histogram on the camera will have little bearing on what the final output will be after I edit the RAW files -- I guessing what I may be missing is the connection between what I see in LR (and/or PS) histograms and what I may be clipping once exported under sRGB (jpeg), apologies if my questions (logic?) have/has some holes. I also realize that histograms aren't the be-all-end-all and that there's quite a few other technical factors to consider, not to mention personal taste and/or subjective factors as well.
I think this is what Jon picked up on when commenting that I may be better off sticking with one color space, likely sRGB, given that I'm still new to most of this -- in that context (I believe) your points are very valid Jon.
Victoria, thanks for the vote of confidence, I do have a better grip on all of this and in theory should be okay working in two different spaces... more so after I take your suggestion to look at a file in ACR with different spaces to learn how to find the limits between the two.
In the name of (more) clarity, here's the "but":
I like the idea of shooting RAW in the Adobe color space for evaluative purposes.... Okay, so now I have some shots on my camera that I'm happy with (exposure, composition, focus, etc etc)
Now I move my raw files into LR and edit away. RAW lets us change all manner of things and the original in-camera histogram really doesn't amount to much anyway now, except for the whole notion that I think learning to take better photographs should start when shooting the photo and then tweak later -- and FWIW, I'm not going to suggest that notion is an argument to shoot JPEGs instead of RAW files.
More fuel: So I've edited my files in LR (or PS, or NX and back to LR) and I'm ready to export to sRGB.
BUT! From Jon's observation, when in LR I'm working in a space named "Melissa", which is neither Adobe 1998 nor sRGB but is close to ProPhoto. I understand that.
So... if I'm working in color space "Melissa" for edits, does it just all come down to experience on how to evaluate the working histogram so that the resulting sRGB JPEG (after export) isn't clipped anywhere? Am I missing something basic?? Would evaluating histograms of RAW files in-camera shot in sRGB help avoid issues after you import into "Melissa" and export back to sRGB???
Hmm.
I may be way off base here, but right now, I'd love to have an option to view a histogram of a JPEG file (or any other format) that would result after export that changes the color space (which is always going to be the case with RAW files in LR) -- but only I'd like to be able to see it before I export.
I suspect that experience is the answer here again, so as mentioned earlier, I think I'm better off to stop thinking so much and keep mucking till I get there.
Jon thanks for the link on bit depths... I know more but as always have more questions, I'll save those for another thread later on down the road.
Cheers, Sean
