Color space – confusion…

I wrote a few days ago that I found out that the color space I was using for most of my photos was the wrong one for web publishing. Many or most of my images were using the AdobeRBG color space whereas for the web one should use sRGB since that is what is universally supported by web browsers.

I would think however that in this day and age web browswers would be advancing to support at least the AdobeRBG or even more comprehensive color spaces like ProPhoto.

I just found an interesting thread where one guy was curious about whether RAW images have a color space assigned to them and the answers and discussion is very interesting:

Re: RAW Color Space
In reply to flbrit, Dec 23, 2009

flbrit wrote:

I know that when I convert my RAW files, I allocate ProPhoto as my color space.

I am no expert so may be wrong but hopefully someone with more knowledge will help out.

Be carefull – if you ‘convert to’ or ‘assign’ a very wide colour space and are only working with 8 bit data (24 bit colour), as most do, then you may have coarse steps/tonal gradients which will contribute to the appearance of extra noise and possible banding in images.

Personaly I would be inclined to stick to either one of the two ‘most industry standard’ colour spaces – i.e. ‘sRGB’ or ‘AdobeRGB’.

My “good” camera has an option for color profile and offers a choice between sRGB, which was the default, and AdobeRGB. I’m not sure if this is just for jpg photos. For image processing software I’ve been working with the default AdobeRGB all along. The problem is the images I saved for the web were also AdobeRGB which makes the colors look muted (and slightly off) when viewed on the web.

I could never figure out why other people’s images always looked so much more vidid than mine. I thought maybe it had to do with my being caucasian. In the end I started compensating by always intensifying the saturation in my images. Now I will have to go back and re-edit all these images and turn down the saturation and hope things turn out. Otherwise I will have to go back to the drawing board and re-process all the images from their original RAWs.