Let's Talk COLOUR SPACE | EV Photo Evolve Series
/Introducing the Evolve Series. A set of blog posts that aim to educate and help you evolve as a photographer. At anytime you can use the search bar for “evolve” and all of these posts will come up and you can choose what content you need.
So I hope to be providing loads of valuable content over the coming months so feel free to get in touch and let me know what you want to hear about but first up…. COLOUR SPACE - WHICH ONE IS FOR ME?
We are often asked which colour space we use and how we like to receive files. The answer is – multiple. Basically we use different colour spaces dependent on how you have processed the files .
The three major ones are:
Prophoto - This is an extremely wide colour space . The human eye is unable to view all of the colours in it and there is not a monitor on the market that can display it (in full). Les Walkling refers to this as an “archiving “ colour space. Its fine to work in and save your files off in but when you go to print you may want to bring it back to Adobe98 which will give you a more definitive idea on screen of the end product.
ADOBE 98 - Beautifully wide colour space ideal for fine art printing as well as high end digital reproduction. Your Eizo monitor will reproduce 99% of this on screen and is the most universal for photographers.
sRGB - Much smaller colour space used for web reproduction and also older wet lab RA4 machines such as Fuji Frontiers.
Source: Google Images
So what do you send us?
What do you give your clients ?
We have a list on the wall of all our clients and their preferred colour space so when we run your job it is done in the space allocated to your name. As we can run both ADOBE and sRGB here this is not a problem, we just need to know how you work your files originally.
The ADOBE98 will give you a wider colour gamut but its important to remember that again – This depends on your process. For example if you process all your files as sRGB then convert them to ADOBE98 at the end - this process will be pointless.
If you are a photographer who deals primarily with families and deliver digital files then you need to ask yourself . “What will they be doing with these?“ They will be putting them online – facebook etc , and if they get them printed chances are it will be at a big chain store like HN. Both of these applications require an sRGB file for the best output. So if this is you then process and deliver as an sRGB file.
Something to consider as a photographer outputting and archiving sRGB as a best option for your clients. If you like to enter awards with physical prints, such as those run by the AIPP, you are going to get much more from the printing process with an ADOBE98 file. Again, do not pull your client file and convert to ADOBE98 for printing as this is pointless - either start your processing again from the RAW with the fine art print in mind, have archived an ADOBE98 set of images before creating a duplicate copy to deliver to your client in sRGB, or finally just send your sRGB file finding peace with the fact it is not the best option for fine art printing.
Going back to client delivery, the worst possible result is to deliver your client files in Prophoto and for them to have these printed on an sRGB machine. All of the information which is “out of gamut “ …which will be ALOT , is squished into the edge of the sRGB space – especially in the greens. This will be far from a desirable outcome and you wont even know that’s what your image looks like in their home. They will end up with a print that looks nothing like the image on screen or that you intended.
If you process using Adobe Lightroom then bear this in mind because the default is automatically set to Prophoto when exporting files.
We hope that this has cleared up the differences between colour space options and highlights this main takeaway - it is important to process for the intended output.
Have a great week! Tristam
