Want to see some crazy colors

Check out this gallery of images from Holi, the Indian festival of color. Be sure to use a color managed browser on this as the images are a mix of sRGB and adobeRGB.

The Boston Globe's awesome photo galleries - all in adobeRGB?

I always thoroughly enjoy the beautiful galleries that the Boston Globe publishes. This time is no exception. I am always struck by the beautifully saturated colors they appear to be able to hit. Of course I always use color managed browsers. Webkit/Safari is my favorite, although I also use Firefox 3 with the secret setting enabled. So I had never noticed this before but all the images on the galleries in the globe are in adobeRGB color space. Of course my browser is color managed so this doesn't matter and it even leads to even better colors on my wide gamut display, however, if you use a non-managed browser like internet Explorer (trash it!) or Chrome, you might want to fire up Safari or Firefox (don't forget to enable the color management) and check out their galleries. The difference is stunning, especially in the gorgeous reds and yellows they have such as the fires near Melbourne of a while ago. They are so much more amazing in a managed browser. This is especially true if you use a laptop with a small gamut display such as a Apple MacBook.

Roll over to see how much better this image looks in a color-managed browser, even on a fully calibrated screen! These are screenshots from the aforementioned bushfire galleries from Firefox using managed and unmanaged settings. The awesome (in the original sense of the word of inspiring apprehension or fear) destructive power of the flames really comes out in an unsettling manner in the managed rendering. Be patient, depending on your connection, the first time this can take a few seconds to appear. After that, it will be instantaneous.


Even though this is simply an error by the web people at that newspaper (they should use sRGB for everything), this is another big argument for using a managed browser at all times.

Relevant example for ppRGB vs adobeRGB

I realized after the last post that I need to give a real world example. The example that I am going to give is from the recent shot below:

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I took this into Photoshop in 16-bit ppRGB and softproofed it to the profile of my local costco's Noritsu and to adobeRGB. In both cases, I show the gamut warning (in grey).

Here is the soft proof for adobeRGB (click for large version):


As you can see a lot is out of gamut in the mountain area that is lit by the rising sun. Especially the green of the trees is far out.

Now take a look at the same for the local costcos:


Far less is out of gamut. Especially the green/yellow of the lit trees is not at all out of gamut, while it was in adobeRGB. This clearly shows that in real world images, you lose colors that even not so wide gamut machines can print if you use adobeRGB as a working space. Of course, there are not really any displays that can actually display these colors...

Why use prophotoRGB instead of adobeRGB as a working color space?

Lightroom uses a variant of prophotoRGB as its internal colorspace and when you export to photoshop, it defaults to prophotoRGB. One could argue that this is overkill and adobeRGB should be wide enough. However, typical DSLRs can easily capture color outside of adobeRGB. "What does that matter if you cannot print those colors?", you might ask. The answer is that as soon as your printer has more inks than just CMYK, you can reproduce colors outside of adobeRGB! This can be easily shown when comparing profiles in Apple's excellent and free colorsync utility app. Even worse, you do not need a good printer to reproduce these colors, if you send your images to Costco's, Adorama, smugmug, and such for printing, you could be using their profiles for conversion and you would be able to reproduce color outside of adobeRGB. Don't believe me, here is the proof:



The wireframe in this graph is adobeRGB, the solid, colored volume is the glossy profile from my local costcos. As you can see the costco profile indicates that their Noritsu in this case can generate color outside of adobeRGB! Now compare this with the same figure for prophotoRGB:



As you see the entire range of colors that costcos printers can reproduce is enclosed.
Of course if you are working in less than 16 bits (everything in LR is 16 bit, so that is not anything to worry about), ppRGB might not be a good choice as you blow up the difference between 2 color values too much and you might get posterization. Fortunately, basically everything in Photoshop is 16 bits nowadays. So for prints from costco, a good workflow is to export to 16-bit ppRGB tiffs/psds, convert to the right profile in photoshop and then convert to 8-bit and save as a jpeg.