sRGB or Adobe RGB

[chandsa]

Originally Posted by knewsom

Anyway, there is a page near the end of the book on "setting up your color management". Their advice is to stay in sRGB unless I'm doing the printing myself, because most labs are set up to handle sRGB files.

Yes, they are right in that the labs will be set up to handle the sRGB files, but if you are making prints that are 8 x 10 or larger, you definitely want to have the labs print at least with the AdobeRGB color space. Why? To make use of the larger gamut available in the AdobeRGB color space to bring out the more subtle tones that are lost if you use the sRGB color space. Most labs will agree to do that i.e., use the AdobeRGB color space to print your files, if they are worth their salt; if not, then you are better off looking at other options for labs.

There are two other options available: to always optimize for printing (using the AdobeRGB) or to allow me to choose between sRGB and AdobeRGB on a file by file basis, with sRGB the default. Now I just need to work through these settings to see what changes I see on screen and maybe send a few files using the different color space settings to see what happens in printing.

Bingo! That's what you need to do. If you have your monitor calibrated, the difference between sRGB and AdobeRGB based files will "jump" at you! One thing that you could do with sRGB files is to gently increase the saturation so that the colors "pop", but again, that doesn't help the subtle tones in the picture.

This is a lot more fun than the income tax return.

You bet! Color science is fascinating and I'm thoroughly enjoying educating myself on this topic..Wait till you get to the point where you have to decide if you want to go with 8-bit color settings or use 16-bits..but I digress! ..Please come back and post what you find based on your experiment.