While working in Photoshop or while exporting your photo, you may have come across different choices of color spaces. While you submit your images to a competition or send them to an institution, you must have also seen that they ask you to send your photos with a specific colour space. In this article, we look at some of the popular color spaces available and their details.
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What is Color Space
In photography, color space is the color range displayed on any particular image. Every file is shown in a color space that varies depending on the screen you’re on, how you’re viewing the image (app), and even the embedded color space used in your camera and throughout the image export process. Traditionally, the colors in your image were either CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, key) or RGB (red, green, blue). In 1931, the International Commission on Illumination, or CIE, created an all-encompassing color space (sometimes called Color Gamut) based on human vision, using averaged results from trials with a small number of test subjects.
Over the years, many institutions (or brands) have created color spaces within the CIE range with specific utilities in mind. Below, we list some of the widely used ones for photography.
The sRGB Color Space
The color space known as Standard Red, Green, and Blue has grown to be essential to digital imaging. It started off as a collaboration between Microsoft and HP in 1996. The purpose of sRGB was to standardize the range of colors across platforms and devices. sRGB covers roughly 35% of the visible color spectrum, making it suitable for digital applications and everyday use. It is one of the most popular and widely used color spaces and also the current standard for World Wide Web. sRGB displays 256 levels of red, blue and green and the images are originally 8-bit per channel. In total, sRGB produces 16 million possible colours. You can see how small is the sRBG triangle color space compared to the complete
sRGB
The Adobe RGB Color Space
In 1998, Adobe Inc. developed a colour space known as Adobe RGB. It is an improvement from its predecessor sRGB. Adobe RGB encompasses roughly 50% of the visible colour spectrum. Adobe RGB covers most of the colours that can be printed on CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, key black) colour printers while making use of the RGB (red, green, and blue) primary colours on a computer monitor. This implies that if you use Adobe RGB, the images you modify on a monitor will print out with colour accuracy. This is the main reason why photographers who print their images prefer Adobe RGB over any other colour space. The majority of monitors used in professional photography can display up to 99% of the Adobe RGB colour space.
Adobe RGB
The ProPhoto RGB Color Space
The ProPhoto RGB colour space was developed by Kodak. It is the largest colour space compared to the other ones mentioned, encompassing over 90% of the visible colour spectrum. In fact, it goes beyond the visible colour spectrum representing 13% of imaginary colours that are not visible, which is one of its disadvantages. Many photographers choose to edit with ProPhoto RGB, which produces the most accurate colours. This provides the most diverse assortment of tones, tints, and hues.
ProPhoto RGB
The Display P3 color Space
This colour space was developed by Apple Inc. Display P3 is an amalgam of the sRGB gamma curve, the D65 white point, and the DCI-P3 colour gamut. It originated from the use of the DCI-P3 colour gamut in digital cinema projectors, which provides more vivid reds and greens than the conventional sRGB colour range. Most of the modern Mac monitors, laptops and other gadgets use this colour space. It is larger than sRGB and is considered a wide colour space.
Display P3
Which Color Space is right for you?
There is no such right or wrong in choosing the colour space. Every colour space has its (almost) specific usage. If you are a photographer who only posts images on web including social media, sRGB should be the choice. This will ensure that your viewers are seeing the right colours as intended. If you are someone who usually prints photos, Adobe RGB is the best choice since it comes closest to the printing colours of CMYK. Prophoto RGB being the largest colour space among all these is the best choice as a main working profile in Photoshop. If you wish to work on a photo across devices or across software, Prophoto RGB will ensure that no colour data is lost. Once the final processing is done, the photo can be exported as sRGB or Adobe RGB according to your need.
Comparison of different colour spaces
Color Space in Photoshop
Color spaces in editing software is a topic for a whole new post, but if you just want to know where you’ll meet color spaces in Photoshop, you’ll see them in two places:
One place is where you select the color space in which you work on your image. The wider the color space, the bigger the file, but also the more granular changes you can make.
The other is the export function, where you can select the color space for your file and if you’d like to embed the actual color profile inside the file. Typically, if you are working on files for the web, use – sRGB, and embed the color profile. This will allow your JPEG file to be displayed as similarly as possible on all devices.
Color Space in Lightroom
The most important place in Lightroom where color space comes into play is the export tab, under the file setting section, and just like with photoshop, in most web-related cases, you’d want to select sRGB.
You will also find a color space selection under the preference menu, where you can chose the color space to use when you send a file to external editing.
