I just read a post at kenrockwell.com in which he says that basically people should only use the sRBG color space unless they have a very specific reason and knowledge about using the Adobe RGB color space when working with images. The reason this is something to consider is because some cameras – such as my Nikon D90 – have the option to shoot pictures in either Adobe RGB or sRGB. The Adobe RGB color space is slighly larger than sRBG but everything pretty much uses sRGB as the standard, including all web browsers and many or most image viewing apps.
In fact, when I started doing my own photography, for the longest time I was always scratching my head why my images would tend to look washed-out, the colors muted and lacking vibrancy. It was because I was using Adobe RBG and not converting the images to sRBG before viewing them online. In some desktop viewing apps they would look ok. But then I was realizing they always looked a lot worse when viewed online so I began to over-enhance the colors and vibrancy to compensate.
So basically I was a textbook example of what Ken is saying about why not to use Adobe RBG. But once I understood what was going on, understood what a “color space” was, and realized how easy it is to just change it in Photoshop, then I continued to shoot in Adobe RBG and just made sure I would always convert the color space at some point when working with the images.
Is there any gain to be had by doing this? I really don’t know exactly. Maybe its like the difference between 44K and 48K sampling rate of audio. Supposedly it is very difficult if not impossible to distinguish between the two, yet many people, including myself, when they have the opportunity, prefer to use 48K (or even the higher 96K) sampling rate when available (which now I think almost all soundcards support).
Another issue I have is that I realized that the D90 is shooting the RAW images in 12-bit format but that upon importing them into Photoshop they were getting converted to 8-bit. I just realized how to fix this (clicking the little informational text at the bottom of the Camera RAW window opens up a settings dialog).
I have been reading up and Firefox is now supporting alternate color spaces with ICC tagging.
All this color space stuff and issues with apps reminds me of the encryption issue with e-mail clients. Its something that should be integrated and just work but up to now has not and requires users to fuss around too much.
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