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Colour Space


D

davecabezo

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Hi All,

I'm new to photoshop and also your forum.
I used to be a quite keen amature photographer many years ago and I have decided to take up the hobby again.
I've read up on digital photography as much as I can over the last year and eventually chose a Panasonic FZ50 camera, purely on cost and convienience of lense etc. I have also purchased Photoshop CS2 and I'm at the moment on a very steep learning curve, trying to familiarise myself with a digital camera and also the complexities of Photoshop. There is so much to learn, and I've also bought a new Graphics card and monitor for my computer.
I have calibrated my monitor with Spyder2 express.

My camera cannot produce, I Don't think, Adobe RGB, only sRGB. My Printer is an Epson R200.

My question is:

Should I configure Photoshop to use Adobe RGB and convert my camera jpeg images then print or should I configure Photoshop to sRGB.

Any help and suggestions are very much appreciated.

Kind regards,

Dave C
 
If you can only shoot in sRGB, then stick with sRGB. Since that is the space that the camera is shooting in, there is no advantage to switching spaces. While AdobeRGB 98 is technically a larger gamut (mostly in the warm tones like orange) the sRGB images you're getting out of the camera don't contain those extra bits of color data. The trick to preserving image data is to make as few conversions as possible when working with a document. While most of them like assigning (not "converting") a new profile won't hurt the image, you increase the likelihood of problems every time you make any change. Even minor changes like switching from RGB to L*a*b and back are rarely and issue (although, I would work on a copy personally) the more changes you make the more you can compound them and eventually have something you notice.

I suppose if you planned on doing a lot of adjustments to the image and started with a clean image (bear in mind that panasonic sensors are unfortunately noisier than others) and you wanted the extra breathing room for editing you could approach the shift on a case by case basis. Overall though, I don't see any reason or advantage to switching color spaces. What the profile does it simply tell the computer what the data in the image is supposed to look like when it's translated to something like... a calibrated monitor... or sent to a printer. The data itself isn't different... simply the method of translation.

If you want to read a really good book about color and computers, pick up Real World Color Management by the late, great Bruce Fraser. One of the few books that I've outright bought.

Hope that helps, I know computer color reproduction is very confusing at first (and second, and third... heh). Good luck.

Welcome to PSG. :)
 
Many thanks Mindbender,

I should also have asked in my first post, if when handling "Raw" data, should I then reset Photoshop to RGB or just stick with sRGB period.

Kind Regards,

Dave
 
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