That's a more complex question than you may realize.

Your choices in color-management hinge on a number of things, including your goals for output and convenience in your workflow.  Your monitor is certainly not the only consideration.

There's really nothing at all wrong with preferring sRGB as your working space, if it suits you.  In fact, as an out-of-box setting Photoshop comes that way.  Web designers or those with older printers might find it a great working space.  I happen to use sRGB for most things myself.

Unfortunately, there are no easy "this is right" and "this is wrong" answers in color-management...  Understanding color-management, soup to nuts, is required for you to be able to make all the right decisions that suit YOUR needs.  All the settings - every single one of them - are needed.

It's probably impossible to teach color-management in a forum, but we could certainly discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of choosing particular working spaces.  Only problem with doing that is that people often tend to try to oversimplify things and say "oh, THAT's the right way", and that simply cannot be done with color-management.

You are wise to question the tutorial, however.  It shows a desire to understand that will ultimately lead you to making better images.

-Noel

By the way, I just watched that tutorial.  The narrator made a number of misstatements, or at best statements that were completely out of context, leading me to wonder whether he knows what he's doing.  He just tells you to set a bunch of settings without giving you any idea what those settings do.  This is not a good video to learn with

-Noel

TomBrooklyn wrote:

 

If someone doesn't have wide gamut monitor, should they, under any circumstances, set Photoshop to work in Adobe RGB?

 

If the answer is yes,  under any circumstances,  how would one know what colors one is working with, since their monitor cannot reproduce that colorspace?

Yes.  Such a circumstance might be if you are anticipating printing to a wide gamut printer.

Keep in mind that many colors in any typical image will fall within the gamuts of both the working space AND the monitor.

For the colors in an image that ARE within the monitor's gamut, and assuming the monitor is properly calibrated and profiled, they will be displayed accurately.  For colors in the image that are within the working space gamut but fall outside the monitor's gamut, they will be jammed to max saturation, and that can look a bit odd but is still at least a semblance of how the image is going to look.  It's the best that monitor can do with the color.

You might not be able to make good decisions with images that have bright colors in them, because you cannot see the distinctions in those colors on your monitor, so using a working space that exceeds your monitor gamut may not be your best choice, though you may choose to do so for practical reasons (e.g., budget).  Note that you can still do things like hover your cursor over the colors and look at the RGB values in the Info panel, and watch your histograms to ensure your processing doesn't introduce clipping.

If both quality and exercising the full gamut of your output device are important to you then you might want to get a monitor that better covers the gamut of your preferred working space.  Or, as you have implied, you could limit your working space and forego the possibility of printing a certain set of deep/bright colors.

Something to keep in mind:  If you choose sRGB in the Camera Raw dialog, then Camera Raw will be faced under some conditions with the task of determining what to do with captured colors that fall outside the working space gamut.  Let that sink in for a moment...  For example, you have a deep, deep blue color that you have photographed.  Camera Raw finds that the color, given your current development settings, cannot be fit into the sRGB color space, so it jams the pixel values to max saturation, and clips the red and green channels to 0, effectively losing information you actually captured.  You will, of course, see that it's doing this by looking carefully at the histogram, and you can choose to adjust the image to try to make it better fit in the sRGB gamut - e.g., by reducing the Saturation control, or lightening shadows, or something.  I personally use a custom camera profile that helps "fit" the colors into sRGB, following Canon's lead in the way they do it if one selects sRGB for the output space in-camera or in the DPP converter.

-Noel

Bravo, Trevor.  Excellent material.

-Noel

There is probably a more simple answer to the question if you send your work to be published on Press or if you do international work in that your images are sent out through an agency worldwide.

The standard is Adobe RGB 1998. Tha is what your art director(s) are expecting orhte wise they have to convert to Adobe RGB for their color correction or adjustments and the adjust that further to compensate for the difference or make a judgment call as to what the color should look like.

But I am toldby printers, magazines, book publishers, art directors and photo agencies that the standard is Adobe RGB 1998 aqlt5hough I believe they will accept ProPhotoRGB as well.

I send my work out as Adobe RGB 1998 and if they use the work on the web it seems to actually end up working better if they convert that to sRGB than the other way around.

TomBrooklyn wrote:

 

For reasons unknown to me, however, I don't think he said anything about the colorspace of the monitor. 

Please read what I wrote in post #1 again.  Realization should start to dawn.

TomBrooklyn wrote:

If someone has a wide gamut printer, but doesn't have a wide gamut monitor, how do they get good prints in ARGB?    They can't see any ARGB on their screen that's going to come out on the printer, right?   So is this a hit or miss operation?     Just print it and hope for the best?

 

I mentioned histograms and checking values via sampling.

Once you learn good photo processing practices, and you do techniques that are good for the in-gamut colors, by extrapolation you can rely on them for the parts you can't see as well.  The color gamut limitations of a monitor certainly aren't the only ways you might not be able to see everything you're doing, and photoshop does provide a lot of facilities, for example proofing and gamut checking tools.  Take the time to read that phscs2ip_colspace.pdf that Trevor posted a link to.

Out of curiosity, is the automobile you have purchased for your loved ones the safest car on the planet?  Or is it a pretty good one that you could afford?  Given that driving is a "hit or miss" operation, do you just let them drive it and hope for the best?

My point is not to be critical of your car choice, but to point out that nothing in life is a sure thing.  You do the best that you can with what you have.

-Noel

Good point, I should have referred to Color Management directly.

Funny thing is that I identify with Tom's statements here, since:

• I don't print much and when I do it's not to wide gamut printers.  My own older HP inkjet requires data be sent to it in the sRGB profile.
• I choose to use Internet Explorer, because its security model is the best of all the browsers (even though with default settings it's less secure).
• Higher consistency between multiple applications on my desktop is important to me, and besides Photoshop I have several non-color-managed tools I also like to use.

Thus I have set my own monitors up to faithfully reproduce sRGB, I use sRGB as my preferred working space in Photoshop, and my workflow squeezes out-of-gamut colors my camera captures into sRGB in a way I find pleasing.

It's important to note that when I do choose to work on a wide gamut image things don't just go horribly wrong.  Everything is fine.  Tom, you'll probably want to actually try working this way in order to see that the implications aren't Earth-shattering.

I have pondered what I will do when my current monitors fail...  Since good quality monitors nowadays are virtually all wide gamut, I've come to the conclusion that with new hardware I would try using the full monitor gamut and seeing how well I could make everything else work (possibly changing the applications I use), but I would be comfortable knowing I could fall back to the monitor's pre-set sRGB mode if that proved intolerable.  My inkjet will, of course, give up the ghost sooner or later, and anything new in that realm is wide gamut as well.  Progress marches on.*

-Noel

* I said "progress marches on", but unfortunately it seems to have stalled in the specific case of the Windows operating system and Microsoft software.  Not only have color-management advancements stopped, but Microsoft seems to be moving away from serious computing for data producers in order to go after consumers only.  I'm not sure what that means for the future of image processing.  Perhaps we'll all find ourselves on Macs one day.

Tom

Color for some is less important then to others because they don't care or for other factors.  For example like 10% of the men in this world I'm a little color blind. I see color quite well but not exactly as others do.  My final color management tool is my wife eyes.  She's tell me if I got it  right.

Part of what you seem to be missing is some knowledge of color management and color managed programs like Photoshop.   It does not matter what color space you edit you image in as for the color you will see on your display. If you edit in sRGB, adobe RGB or ProPhotoRGB color spaces the colors you see on the screen should be the same if you have set thing up correctly.

You should first of all calibrate your monitor so it will display colors the best it can.  Because of my color blindness I do not buy a hardware calibration solution its not going to make a big difference for me if I use a software solution or hardware solution.  I just need my display to be close and there are many tools and test image that will enable you to get close to a 2.2 gamma with good color.

During calibration a Color Profile for your display is created and set into you systems configuration.  From then on when you boot you system you video card color LUT(Look Up Table) will be set/loaded   When a color managed program like Photoshop displays an Image on your display that has a color profile the image will be rendered for you displays color profile.   Photoshop will use the Image's color profile and your display's color profile to render an images on you display with colors that are as close to the image's colors that your display can give you.

Photoshop also has a soft proofing feature where it will use the Image's color profile, and your Printers/Paper/Ink profile to render an image on your display using your displays color profile so that the colors you see will be as close to the colors you will get from your printer as close as you display can display them.

So as far as the colors you see on your display it does not matter much which color space you edit in.

The space you choose to edit in depends mostly on your use of the images.

If all your going to use your images on is the Web.  You might as well just choose sRGB set you camera and Photoshop preferences to sRGB and be done with it.

If you want to print your image and get the best possible colors you need to consider the actual print process.  What are the capabilities of the printer they will be printed on.  Good printers may have much better capabilities then your display.  You will get better prints if you process you images well and use a wider color space then your display has.

When I write process your images well I mean preserve you images colors.  If you do heavy image manipulation it is very easy to mess up an image's colors. If possible you should shoot RAW and convert you images into a wide color space with 16Bit color depth.

Most device drivers only support 8Bit color, however you can still edit in 16bit mode to have a little more latitude while you edit   Artefacts like Posterization are less likely to happen when you edit in 16Bit color mode.

TomBrooklyn wrote:

 

Why does the author of the following youtube video, on how to set up Photoshop

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjJuPGiMsHc&feature=fvwrel

 

state, at 1:28, that "We're going to want to set the Space to Adobe RGB1998?"

Maybe because he doesn't have a clue? (not that you do either I might add).

Look, it's simple, the ONLY color space that can contain ALL of the colors your camera can capture in raw is ProPhoto RGB (Adobe RGB is a poor cousin at best). But, you better be willing to use 16-bit/channel or else risk posterization...)

If you knew a bit more we could explain it to you but it seems you are more interested in starting a fight than learning...sorry, at the moment I don't have the time to waste fighting with you (regardless of how much fun it would be). If you don't understand the answer, you shouldn't ask the question. So stick with sRGB for your work (it'll make you feel superior even though you are not getting everything your camera can capture).

Really it's not worth the effort to educate you if your biggest desire is to argue. If you want the LEARN, then get back to use. But between this and a couple of other threads you've started, the Photoshop User to User forum seems to be your newly discovered playground. And some of us don't want to play your game...if you really knew what you were doing you wouldn't ask the question and would be using ProPhoto RGB in 16-bit/channel cause you knew it was optimal. If you don't understand that, keep using sRGB...