sRGB or Prophoto for 72% monitor.

[nospe7880]

My monitor on HP touchsmart desktop is rated as 72% according to the manufacturers specifications. I have read that 72% equates to approx. 100% of SRGB.. Would I therefore be better to use SRGB instead of Prophoto in PS.? If I use Prophoto what effects could this have on my images if the monitor can't handle the wider gamut of Prophoto?

Thanks

Bernard Smith

[Manfred M]

My monitor on HP touchsmart desktop is rated as 72% according to the manufacturers specifications. I have read that 72% equates to approx. 100% of SRGB.. Would I therefore be better to use SRGB instead of Prophoto in PS.? If I use Prophoto what effects could this have on my images if the monitor can't handle the wider gamut of Prophoto?

Thanks

Bernard Smith

I would try both to see what works out best for you. If most of your shooting tends to be in gamut anyways, you may not find a lot of difference.

My view is that Adobe has chosen a variant of the ProPhoto as the default colour space, it suggests to me that this is not a bad choice to use in edits. It preserves the colours that your camera has captured better than the other colour spaces. Make sure you use 16-bit if you are editing raw data in ProPhoto, otherwise you will get artifacts. This is less of an issue with AdobeRGB, but I find 16-bit works well there too, even though it increase file size a bit; 8-bit is fine for jpegs (as they are 8-bit anyways, so going 16-bit gets you bigger file size without any improved colour quality).

[James G]

Bernard, Manfred has already covered the key points. My old HP monitor (still in use, but for general browsing these days), met a 76% Adobe RGB standard and 100% for sRGB. Compliance was measured using the DataColor Spyder system.

I stuck with AdobeRGB , in part because I print quite a few of my images. My Epson SC P600 printer has a wider gamut than sRGB, so it made some kind of sense to go with the 'larger' gamut while processing on the monitor, .... in fact I now process end to end in ProPhoto. I only convert to sRGB if posting to web.

My new(ish) BenQ Monitor gives 99% of AdobeRGB and I did 'see' a difference between both monitors when I first the BenQ up.

[Manfred M]

My new(ish) BenQ Monitor gives 99% of AdobeRGB and I did 'see' a difference between both monitors when I first the BenQ up.

I just upgraded to the same BenQ last week and all I can say is the reviews and good press are correct about the performance. I would highly recommend it to anyone considering a wide gamut screen. The value proposition is excellent and its performance is as good as an in many cases better than many of the higher end "pro" offerings.

The only downside I see is the 16:9 format, which is great for video work, but not quite as good for image editing. The other downside is that Adobe products seem to have been designed for either 2K or 4K and not the 2.5K of this screen, so the menus and text are either a bit too small for my liking or much too large.

[DanK]

Would I therefore be better to use SRGB instead of Prophoto in PS.? If I use Prophoto what effects could this have on my images if the monitor can't handle the wider gamut of Prophoto?

Leave it in prophoto, which allows more editing without artifacts. Photoshop will render the image as sRGB on your monitor regardless. You won't need to deal with gamut issues until you print. At that point, IMHO, you are better off having the additional data and deciding how to deal with it. You can always convert the image to sRGB at that point, or edit based on soft proofing to deal with the out of gamut colors.

My monitor has an sRGB gamut, and I leave all my software set to use prophoto internally. Lightroom actually gives you no choice in thematter.

[James G]

The other downside is that Adobe products seem to have been designed for either 2K or 4K and not the 2.5K of this screen, so the menus and text are either a bit too small for my liking or much too large.

I agree with you about the 16:9 format, though I find it useful for 'letterbox' crops whicjh I have a strange fondness for
I ended up moving as many of the tools and menus as I could to a second monitor. The BenQ is 'dedicated' to viewing the image. The HP I mentioned earlier which is rather long in the tooth now, sits as a third monitor to the right and has been set up in portrait mode and I use it mostly for web searches and document presentation.

[DanK]

This is off the original topic, but since we have a few BenQ users here, maybe you can answer a question that has stopped me from getting a wide-gamut monitor:

My images are viewed online much more than in print, and most of the people seeing them online don't have wide-gamut monitors. That means I have to post a version edited to look OK in sRBG. How do you deal with this? Do you switch to an sRGB gamut somehow and edit a copy to post? Or do you edit it in a wider gamut and hope it looks right in sRGB?

thanks

Dan

[Manfred M]

This is off the original topic, but since we have a few BenQ users here, maybe you can answer a question that has stopped me from getting a wide-gamut monitor:

My images are viewed online much more than in print, and most of the people seeing them online don't have wide-gamut monitors. That means I have to post a version edited to look OK in sRBG. How do you deal with this? Do you switch to an sRGB gamut somehow and edit a copy to post? Or do you edit it in a wider gamut and hope it looks right in sRGB?

thanks

Dan

I convert all my images to sRGB before posting. I assume most people use sRGB screens that are not calibrated and profiled and likely use a Microsoft browser that does not manage colours very well.

Photoshop takes care of the out of gamut colours during the conversion process. I use the "Convert to profile" menu selection, and just like when I prepare for printing, the pop up box lets me select the rendering intent. I usually use the "relative colormetric" intent but have used "perceptual" on occasion.

So far as I remember, I only ran into one occasion where I did not like the results of going from wide gamut to sRGB. The image had very rich saturated colours and looked terrible (in my view) in the smaller colour space.

[Mike Buckley]

I only ran into one occasion where I did not like the results of going from wide gamut to sRGB.

When you make the change to sRGB, do you usually prefer the look of the wide gamut color space or the sRGB color space when viewing both on your wide gamut monitor?

[Manfred M]

When you make the change to sRGB, do you usually prefer the look of the wide gamut color space or the sRGB color space when viewing both on your wide gamut monitor?

Definitely the wide gamut colour space. If I wanted to see just sRGB I could simply have saved a lot of money and bought a cheaper computer screen. My screen does let me switch between AdobeRGB and sRGB at the touch of a button.

[DanK]

This is VERY helpful. I'm in the early stages of planning my next computer upgrade, and I'm leaning toward a wide-gamutmonitor as my primary monitor. I had been thinking about BenQ, although the 16:9 aspect ratio is a deterrent.

[James G]

Basically I do the same as Manfred. In Photoshop under File>Scripts is an option 'Image Processor' to process single or groups of images and output them as JPG. There is an associated tickbox that allows/specifies profile conversion to sRGB.

The BenQ monitor comes with a 'doodad' that enables me to switch/cycle the display from AdobeRGB to sRGB to monochrome, and and the wide gamut colour space is definitely preferable.

[Manfred M]

although the 16:9 aspect ratio is a deterrent.

In my experience the issue is actually quite minor and I got used to it within a day or two. The screen producers are stuck with what the panel factories produce and this format width is what seems to drive the current high end panels that go into these screens. The quality and accuracy of the colour output and the decent contrast really make using the SW2700 a lot better than the screen I replaced.

You might want to give the following article a quick look:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...itor,4374.html

[DanK]

Thanks. My office monitors are 16:9, but much smaller, so the BenQ might be fine. The price is right.