Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave Canon
If you intend printing, then you should use Adobe RGB (1998) as colour space on your camera and set it as the working space in PhotoShop or Elements. sRGB is intended for web and consumer devices such as digital projectors and is a smaller colour gamut than Adobe RGB (1998). You can always convert to sRGB for web output.
|
I have to chime in on this one, it's one of my specialties... but I will keep it brief. I agree in theory... but not always in practice for one simple reason, all printers don't follow the rules. The biggest problem I see out there is that a lot of companies don't pay much attention to profiling and just go for the mass consumer solution.
Personally, I tend to be a cheap guy so I look for the highest quality for the cheapest price. I use a mass market printer, they are basically using excellent equipment these days but set to complete auto pilot mode. In doing so, most are set to assume a sRGB profile is being used. For 90%+ of the market... it is.
Yes, if you are using a professional developer (and even some more consumer oriented developers), they will recognize that you have used (and should have embedded) an Adobe 1998 profile giving you a better quality print. On that note, there are better profiles out there than Adobe 1998... but I am not going there.
With all of this in mind, some desktop printers are set up the same way, sRGB is expected, prints will look better if printed after being converted to sRGB. Is this professional? No... Is your desktop printer professional? Even if it is a professional grade printer, are you using the internal rip or a separate rip solution? For the most part, the internal rips are terrible...
To keep it simple, you camera should be set to Adobe 1998, but you HAVE to process your images. Simply converting them to sRGB for screen is needed. Play with what prints better... technical excellence doesn't always make for the best print.
I will finish with what I use on a daily basis.
A: Xerox color copy for quick previews... sRGB works better, the color isn't great no matter what! sRGB works out well without a whole lot of tinkering with the internal rip settings. (Which I had did... until my co-works needed me to explain why they had to set up every document they printed differently then they had for years to get the same quality they were used to before I 'improved' the printer)
B: HP5500 with external rip... only Adobe 1998 or CMYK SWOP v2.
C: Sending out work to a Lambda (continuous tone printer)... I only use the Adobe 1998 profile or better.