ProPhoto RGB or Adobe RGB(1998) for printing?

[bnnrcn]

My Landscape Photography book says , ProPhoto is for fine art printing, Adobe RGB is for high quality commercial printing and sRGB is for web posting. So, if I want to print one of my images , is Adobe RGB ,which I use while editing, enough or do I need to edit the image with ProPhoto color space?

[Manfred M]

Are you printing this image yourself, using a photo printer, or are you going to a commercial photo printer?

If using a commercial printer, then as your final step, you should convert your file to a sRGB, high quality jpeg.

If you are printing yourself, it matters less as long as you let Photoshop handle the printing (needs to be set up on the printing popup in Photoshop). I tend to convert to AbobeRGB at that time, as my base editing is always done in ProPhoto.

[Mike Buckley]

Your book mentions using Adobe RGB for a "high-quality commercial printer" and Manfred mentions using sRGB for a "commercial printer." From what I've seen posted here, some (very few) commercial printers are equipped to print using Adobe RGB; they're probably the high-quality printers that can discuss the issue with you or have posted the information on their website. Based on my experience, almost all commercial printers require sending them sRGB though MPIX.com advises NOT to embed the color profile. My guess is that they embed whatever profile works best for them.

The moral of the story is to check with whatever commercial printer you decide to use.

[Mike Buckley]

is Adobe RGB ,which I use while editing, enough or do I need to edit the image with ProPhoto color space?

You'll find a litany of discussions explaining why you should always edit images using the widest possible color space. Though I disagree that that's necessary, I also find no fault with the people who hold to that philosophy. It's best that you find a fit that works best for you so long as you clearly understand why it works best rather than doing so simply because people tell you that it's best.

[Colin Southern]

You'll find a litany of discussions explaining why you should always edit images using the widest possible color space. Though I disagree that that's necessary, I also find no fault with the people who hold to that philosophy. It's best that you find a fit that works best for you so long as you clearly understand why it works best rather than doing so simply because people tell you that it's best.

Unless people really understand what they're doing - generally - I maintain that editing images in ProPhoto is a bad idea because it's possible that the image will contain colours that the monitor cannot reproduce accurately - so - they get reproduced as something else. And the moment people think "hang on a moment - those colours don't look right - let me try fix them", they start digging a big hole for themselves. Editing colours that you can't see accurately is flying blind - and it's dangerous, IMO.

[ajohnw]

I think that the comments in the book are misleading anyway. They imply that having more colours available means art and that one must be better than another for just that reason. A typical book comment.

Here's some one else who has a different view. I don't think he is the only one either

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

One aspect of that is the mention of fully saturated colours. Prints are in more need of some degree of that than monitors but the visual world isn't exactly full of them.

If some one wants to work in prophoto vanishingly small tutorials can be found on the web. One I remember said something like nudge this colour but not too far just a bit. I believe Colin has a more scientific approach.

The other weird aspect about colour is that the vast majority of people have monitors that are much better calibrated than their cameras and that PP often includes colour adjustment to suit the gamut. Any output can still be artistic.

Personally I have no interest at all in anything over sRGB for two reasons. Any printing would be done commercially and not by me. The other is that things are currently in place for true higher bit depth gamuts. I don't see the reason for some changes that have been made over the years unless this will happen at some point. I wouldn't want to waste my money on things that will become obsolete overnight.

One thing I note about Prophoto is that it's pushed rather a lot. Usage seems to be low in the "normal" world.

One thing that caused me some confusion is that a package I use should be set for a prophoto workspace but this doesn't have anything to do with an output gamut even to the screen. I have wondered if some Adobe packages work the same way. I also wonder why prophoto often gets capitol P's. Must be a mark of respect.

John
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[Colin Southern]

Here's some one else who has a different view. I don't think he is the only one either

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

Not quite as relevant in 2014 as it was in 2006 when he wrote it, but I believe most of his points still stand.

In fact, he sounds a LOT like me. Scary.

[Manfred M]

Unless people really understand what they're doing - generally - I maintain that editing images in ProPhoto is a bad idea because it's possible that the image will contain colours that the monitor cannot reproduce accurately - so - they get reproduced as something else. And the moment people think "hang on a moment - those colours don't look right - let me try fix them", they start digging a big hole for themselves. Editing colours that you can't see accurately is flying blind - and it's dangerous, IMO.

Colin - the same thing can (and should) be said about people editing in AdobeRGB when their monitor is sRGB. One can only assume that the drivers and software isolate us from those "glitches", and they do a decent job mapping the colours we can't on our screens see into a reasonable versions of ones we can.

As someone who has switched to ProPhoto a few months ago, I can't say I've seen an issue (yet?). The "artificial' colours tend to be at the extreme ends of the spectrum; the fluorescent blues, neon greens, etc. but the colours that we tend to see in real images are primarily the ones we see in the more common gamuts.

[bnnrcn]

Thank you everybody, your comments have been really helpful for me to understand the matter

[Mike Buckley]

Binnur,

Whatever decision you make, you might want to run your reasoning by us. It really is your reasoning that matters and we'll be sure to confirm whether you're using sound logic based on accurate understanding.

Notice that I didn't mention what I use for editing or printing. Though I'm confident that my reasoning is sound and based on an accurate understanding, that shouldn't matter to you because you could understandably use different and still sound reasoning based on the same accurate understanding. In other words, it's all about finding a good fit; you're fit may not be the same as mine or anybody's.

[DanK]

Binnur,

The advice in your book makes no sense to me. No one prints the entire ProPhoto color space, and I can't see why a printer would want it.

I think it makes sense to separate the printing and editing questions. Re printing: if you are sending your images to a lab, just ask them. I print most of my own, so my experience is limited, but as far as I know, most want sRGB, and some will take either sRGB or Adobe RGB. I have used Bay Photo, a very high quality lab, and they accept only those two, not ProPhoto.

If you are printing your own, I don't think it matters for printing purposes, as your software will have to map from whatever color space you are using to the color range of the combination of printer and paper you are using. These are often less than even sRGB. I print almost entirely from Lightroom, even when I have used other editors, and Lightroom doesn't even ask. It just maps to the ICC.

Re editing: as far as I know, if you are using Lightroom and starting from raw files, you are using Melissa, a variant of ProPhoto, as your editing color space. Lightroom automatically maps to the color space of your monitor. Photoshop does too. I see this clearly when I stack images. My workflow for stacking is this: start in Lightroom, export 16-bit TIFFs to Zerene for stacking, import the composite image into Lightroom for editing, edit in Photoshop if necessary, then back into Lightroom. When I export from Lightroom to Zerene, I have to tell it what color space to use. I use ProPhoto, since it came from and will go back into Lightroom, which uses ProPhoto. Zerene, unlike Lightroom and Photoshop, does not map from the working color space to the color space of the monitor, so the images look bad until I bring them back into Lightroom, where they look fine.

Rockwell wrote this:

So long as you haven't screwed with anything, you and the world are shooting in sRGB.

That's completely incorrect if you are shooting raw. If you are shooting raw, you are not in the sRGB color space, and you are capturing more color detail than sRGB.

Re Colin's comment that it is risky to edit in a larger space than sRGB: that would be so if the software does not do a good job of mapping to your monitor as you edit. I haven't heard of that being a problem with modern software, and I haven't had a problem of this sort.

The main problem I have had is that even the sRGB space is more than some printer + paper combinations can produce, particularly in the case of matte papers. Like many people, I check that by softproofing, but if you want to be really careful, you can do a test print as well. This problem will show up regardless of your internal editing color space. My problem is that I often find it hard to find a reasonable fix when softproofing shows that my image (represented as sRGB on my cheap monitors) is out of gamut for the paper I want to use.

Dan

[Acorn]

The matter of colour is a very subjective matter. Many, many moons ago in the days of letterpress printing, I worked in the process engraving trade and was involved with the production of four-colour plates. At the time they would take several weeks to complete an etched set from a perfectly exposed colour transparency. Before being mounted, proofs would be sent to the customer for approval. In some cases the customer would return the proofs, asking say, strengthen the magenta here or reduce the cyan there. It was often a case of ridiculously splitting a split hair as though the end viewer of the finished printed four-colour picture had a copy of the transparency in front of him or her.

Just how much can the human eye see? I've been to photographic exhibitions where many of the pictures are nothing more than being too clever with Photoshop in terms of colour manipulation.

[Mark von Kanel]

This sounds very similar to another recent thread! one discovery i made whilst sorting out my gamut settings is that LR edits ONLY in Prophoto (as far i can tell im still googling to see if its changable)and so ive set all my other stuff to do the same. and when i output i do so accordingly...It will be interesting to see if Adobe are using a flash in the pan gamut.

My reasoning for doing this is that it makes sense to me to not keep switching gamuts, and as LR seems fixed to Prophoto then thats what ill in PS as well and the output in whatever is appropriate.

[Manfred M]

It was often a case of ridiculously splitting a split hair as though the end viewer of the finished printed four-colour picture had a copy of the transparency in front of him or her.

Barry; I suspect that your example is simply of human nature at work.

If you ask someone for comments, you will get them, warranted or not. I find the same thing happens when one send a document out for review; people make editorial comments; in places where they are not warranted because they can. I have rather vivid memories of a (now retired) vice-president of the company I work for who would "clarify" my work by adding jargon and obfuscating something that I worked very hard at to ensure that the document was easy to read.

Somehow people feel that through some inate reason, they are experts in both colour management and whatever language they are working in.

[ajohnw]

It isn't possible to print the entire prophoto gamut Dan because it contains colours we can't even see. They could be printed but ..........

Ken Rockwell's comments need reading in the way he intends them to be read - that comment given a default install of a PP package is probably completely correct. The other point of course is numerically sRGB is way ahead of others.

Raw is also capturing more colour shades than aRGB. I'm not ever going to mention the fact that Adobe RGB is a 24bit colour space again as is sRGB so it contains just as many colours. Well I have and until some one shows me an active and in use specification for a 30bit aRGB that's it as far as I am concerned. My understanding is that on a monitor it is as wide as a 24bit colour system can be and still produce decent results. It's based on an HDTV video standard. Not on cmyk printing as it contains colours that these wont show. Which just goes to show that care is needed when things are read on the web. I've been mislead on it several times.

http://dba.med.sc.edu/price/irf/Adob...s5/rgbset.html

I hope no one takes my obsolete over night comment too seriously but I believe a true 30bit gamut is on it's way and wonder why it hasn't happened yet. Probably because the ramifications in a number of areas could be rather serious.

John
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[Manfred M]

John - Go to the source; the ICC - http://www.color.org/chardata/rgb/adobergb.xalter

ICC shows a 8 and 16-bit (integer) standard for Adobe RGB as well as a 32-bit floating point one.

[ajohnw]

This sounds very similar to another recent thread! one discovery i made whilst sorting out my gamut settings is that LR edits ONLY in Prophoto (as far i can tell im still googling to see if its changable)and so ive set all my other stuff to do the same. and when i output i do so accordingly...It will be interesting to see if Adobe are using a flash in the pan gamut.

My reasoning for doing this is that it makes sense to me to not keep switching gamuts, and as LR seems fixed to Prophoto then thats what ill in PS as well and the output in whatever is appropriate.

This area, having a software base, roused my feelings about efficiency. To me it makes little sense to take what comes out of a camera va a profile and then numerically translate that to some gamut that isn't used much. So I start wondering why. One reason could be very simple. If something is stored in prophoto and then might and probably will be translated into another gamut that is actually being worked on all the prophoto aspect is really is a sort of transport format that can hold all other gamuts. In other words an image could be worked on with a prophoto workspace along with an sRGB output profile and still saved as prophoto and loaded up into another package as prophoto but still with an sRGB output profile. In fact it should only contain the sRGB colours anyway.

So really taking the output from a camera via a profile and transporting as prophoto isn't really any different to transporting it as a TIFF,PNG or JPG. It will just contain any changes that have been made which ever it is.

Anyway I will never be going CC even though it seems I could run it on Linux so will never know what it does. Also mildly amused following criticism for my use of several packages after reading this.

John
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[Manfred M]

This sounds very similar to another recent thread! one discovery i made whilst sorting out my gamut settings is that LR edits ONLY in Prophoto.

Mark - I believe this was true for older versions of LR; but as you can see from this screenshot, this is not the case for LR5.

[Mark von Kanel]

Thanks Manfred

im still on lr4 guess i need to upgrade! but i thought you didnt use LR???

[Manfred M]

Thanks Manfred

im still on lr4 guess i need to upgrade! but i thought you didnt use LR???

I generally don't, but my wife does, which means I need to know it. LR5 does default to ProPhoto, though

On the other hand, it should suggest that the various ProPhoto naysayers; thousands of users have been using ProPhoto, since 2006 (when Lightroom 1 came out) without all of the dire warnings of problems with that colour space coming true.