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Colour Space confusion

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achrysos

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I'm a bit worried about opening a can of worms here which will just add to my confusion, but here goes anyway.

There are two threads flowing through my mind. First is to use a consistent colour space in the camera and when editing/printing etc. In my case, my camera is set to give AdobeRGB 1998 and I set the export in LR to be the same.

Then there is the idea of calibrating the monitor to achieve that consistency between the various items in the photographic chain. For that I use Spyder2express. [Cheap I know, but it seems to do a decent job. But now that I have a dual monitor set up I will need to upgrade.... sorry for the aside!]

I am quite happy and fully understand the need for these. However, when I discovered that you could actually look at the colour spaces (using ColorSync Utility on a Mac) I decided to compare the two spaces (AdobeRGB and my colour calibrated monitor) and became confused..... The two are compared in the image below, the Adobe space being the gray box, and the much larger one, with my calibrated monitor space nicely snuggled up inside.

ColorSpaceComp.png


And so that is my confusion - how can my monitor properly represent the colours my camera captures and LR edits, if its space is so much smaller? If I set AdobeRGB as the profile for my monitor then it just looks ughh and seems to defeat the purpose of calibrating.

Sorry for the long post, but can anyone explain to me what I am not understanding here?

Thanks in advance!
 
If you are using LR and shooting raw what you set the camera for does not matter one iota. except to the jpeg you see on the screen in teh pack or the jpeg you shoot with the raw which is a waste of space with LR and shooting raw.

The image space of LR is ProPhoto (with some differences) and wider than what your monitor can show but wide for processing! You have to calibrate your monitor our you will never see the colors you want correctly in LR.

For a lot more on all of this see Digital-Image Color Spaces.

Don
 
Don,

Thanks for the response and the link. I will read it with interest (and hopefully come out of it with better understanding).

You have to calibrate your monitor our you will never see the colors you want correctly in LR.

Can I explore this sentence of yours a bit more? I understand why I have to calibrate, but I guess the question I should be asking is, given the size of the colour space is it sufficiently large for me to see the colours correctly? ProPhoto is a large space and gives me lots of elbow room while in the Develop module - but will I see that elbow room as my monitor has a much more confined colour space?

Do you see what I'm getting at?
 
achrysos;1731' said:
And so that is my confusion - how can my monitor properly represent the colours my camera captures and LR edits, if its space is so much smaller? If I set AdobeRGB as the profile for my monitor then it just looks ughh and seems to defeat the purpose of calibrating.
Antonio, the simple answer is that your monitor can't properly represent 'all' of the colors. No monitor can. But it can display many of the colors.

Your camera is colorimetrically calibrated by the manufacturer.
Your monitor is colorimetrically calibrated by you.
The printer at your photo lab is colorimetrically calibrated. If it's a pro friendly lab, they'll give you the profiles.

All of this tied together means that an eight-bit RGB color defined as ''1,''1, 255 will be the exact same shade of royal blue in all calibrated color managed applications/outputs. (Subject to differing viewing conditions)

Unfortunately, there are an infinite number of colors between ''1,''1,254 and ''1,''1,255, which your monitor can't display. Using 16 bits, LR is able to deal with 65,536 (out of infinite possiblities) shades of blue between those two points, which gives it a great deal of precision in dealing with its color interpretations. In practical terms, this allows LR to make large adjustments without compressing adjacent pixels into being the same color which creates an unwanted effect called banding or posterization.

The good news is that with calibration, and color management the colors that you see displayed on your monitor are accurate. There's just not as many of them available as there are in real life. That's just the physics of monitors. The physics of printing is a little better in this aspect, but in the big scheme of things they still have a very limited gamut compared to real life.

Your friends and family, or the average total stranger, probably have no calibration at all for viewing your images from the web or from CD or email, so they'll never be seeing the right colors, no matter what you do.

If you've spent any time at all reading LR forums, you will have heard many, many users requesting a function called 'soft-proofing'. This is a method of simulating your image's output from a device with a different profile, such as a lab's printer. Again, it won't be accurate to true life exactly, but it will enable you to see where your colors will be compressed by the output gamut and compensate for that ahead of time.

Thomas Knoll, godfather of Photoshop, and Adobe Camera Raw, and one of the world's leading authorities on this particular subject has said, "Photographers demand accurate color, and when we give it to them, they say 'Yuck'."

AdobeRGB is the wrong space for your monitor. sRGB was developed specifically to represent the gamut of the typical computer display. You probably want to set your monitor to the profile developed by Spyder when you calibrated.

This is an extremely complex subject, and it's likely that I've messed up a detail or terminology somewhere, but in a broad strokes overview, this is basically what's happening.

The very best you can hope for is to calibrate your monitor, and assign appropriate profiles to your exports or prints.
 
When I read more this subject it gets more difficult.

I am not a color-space-expert, just a free-time-photographer.

I use : Nikon D3'', LR and NX2, Canon i995'.

What colorspace should I select?

D3'': sRGB or ADOBE 1998

LR: ???

Canon i995' ???

I thought max for each chain is the best, but I doubt this now.
 
Willem,

From the sound of the advice that I was given, you should set your camera to have the largest space possible (Adobe RGB1998 ) in this case. LR will use ProPhoto as its colour space. It'll depend on the printer model whether you can use ProPhoto (do if it can), otherwise go with the largest (probably Adobe), although you should be really using the colour profiles of the printer paper (which are actually much larger than your monitor).

From all that I've read and been told, the important thing is to have the monitor calibrated so that colours match across from monitor to printer.
 
If you're shooting raw, it is irrelevant what color space you select on the camera.

(Exception -- that choice affects the camera-processed JPEG preview that is embedded in the raw file. This is the image shown on the LCD on the back of the camera, and is used to calculate the histogram displayed on the camera. But once you're in LR, it truly is irrelevant.)
 
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