Christopher Grey

A question that’s come up frequently in my workshops and classes is, “What Color Space should I be shooting in?” The answer is, “It depends on what you’re shooting for.” That’s not an artful dodge, it’s the truth in digital terms.

Your camera will offer at least two choices, Adobe RGB (1998) and sRGB. Both are viable but there are differences you should be aware of. Adobe RGB (1998), which we’ll simply call “RGB” from now on, is a large color space (also called a “gamut”) able to record more colors than sRGB, a smaller space able to record fewer colors. At first blush you’d think that RGB would be the way to go, right? Isn’t it better to have more colors than less? It is, if you’re work is being produced for mechanical reproduction, like a book. When a book is produced, images appearing in it are converted to yet another color space, CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key {Black}), that’s even smaller than sRGB. It’s necessary for a CMYK reproduction to have as much color as possible at its disposal before conversion, so that the smaller space will “see” as much color as it can.

A graph of the three color spaces and the range of colors they can reproduce. Adobe RGB(1998) is the largest, sRGB fits inside it. The smallest is the CMYK color space.

The sRGB color space is used for images that will be sent to a lab for printing as 8×10s, 5×7s, whatever. The printers used by the labs are sRGB devices themselves, incapable of seeing the entire RGB gamut, much less reproducing it. The machine may not even recognize an RGB file, and an operator will have to manually convert the images to sRGB before sending the order back through the printer. Some labs charge extra for this service.

The Internet is also an sRGB device. Images posted on the web should be sRGB images or they will look flat and slightly off-color.

Unless you have one of a very select (and expensive) group of monitors built for the RGB color space, you won’t be able to see the extra colors anyway. Your monitor is an sRGB device and can’t see beyond those colors, even if you shoot files in RGB.

The bottom line is there’s nothing wrong with the sRGB space and, if you shoot to have your pictures hung on walls or framed on mantles, sRGB is the space to use.