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i was taught to use srgb only for net sites and adobe rgb for photos but several books and sites now state that for 16 bit photos from say top of the line canon cameras for prints being printed with semi-pro epson printers that prophoto rgb may give a broader range of colors
That’s the conventional "wisdom". The problem I have with this line of reasoning is that it is generally theoretical in nature, and not illustrated with actual images or specific colors that actually benefit. All inkjet printers can produce radioactive looking cyan, magenta, and yellow colors, but these colors would never appear in a normal looking photograph.
Printers are also good at layering lots of ink, and producing subtle dark colors that are hard to see. For example, there is a dark terra-cotta color that is easily produced on a printer is impossible to see on a monitor. To most people, this color appears as a muddy, dark brown color, and the saturation, as such, is nothing to be excited about. It’s important to retain, or emphasize, the overall hue and luminance variation in such colors, and of less interest to elevate the saturation to unreal levels that do not look natural.
what is impractical about prophoto rgb?
Obviously a lot of excellent work is being done in this color space. In spite of this, I do suggest that it’s overkill. For example, you can get banding in skies with ProPhoto unless you use 16 bit color. It’s also easy to produce out of gamut colors in ProPhoto RGB that are hard to tame when the time comes to print them.
Some advocates of ProPhoto RGB suggest that using the smaller color spaces – including Adobe RGB – is like making a pizza on a one foot diameter table. If we accept that logic, then ProPhoto is like making a pizza in the center of a grotesquely large table a hundred feet or more in diameter.
(i have no financial interest in any of these products)
Many could not say that, but this does point out the problem of who do you trust, given that so many people accept money from the industry to promote particular views. One way to avoid this problem is to go by what you can actually see on the page or on the screen.
If you are interested in looking at color gamuts, there is a free download, LabMeter, that uses Photoshop’s gamut warning to show the gamuts of various color spaces:
http://curvemeister.com/downloads/LabMeter/CurvemeisterLabMe ter.zip I’m interested in the general subject of hard to reproduce colors. In the following article I discuss, but do not resolve, an example of a cobalt blue color that looks worse when previewed from ProPhoto RGB than sRGB. This includes a raw original, as well as tiff files in several color spaces. The problem appears to be an interaction of ProPhoto RGB and a particular Epson printer profile. I’d be interested in anyone’s comments on this.
http://curvemeister.com/tutorials/ColorZoo/index.htm —
Mike Russell – www.curvemeister.com
