Color profi les

essential skills: photographic lighting Color profiles

Digital cameras tag each and every image captured with an image profile. This profile describes to the image-editing software the way the camera has interpreted and recorded the colors that it has captured. In this way the colors can be accurately displayed on your calibrated and profiled screen.

Choosing a color space for the capture device

Most DSLR cameras and some digicams allow the user to choose one of two profiles, Adobe RGB or sRGB. When capturing images in the Raw format it is the editing software that understands the color characteristics of the sensor you have been using. If scanning film the color characteristics of the scanning device need to be tagged to each and every image as a scanner profile.

Note > Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop Lightroom may need updating to the current version or the latest plug-in to read the Raw files from a new digital camera.

Choosing a Working Space for Photoshop

Photoshop can work with a range of colors that is bigger than the color gamut of the monitor. To work with these additional colors that are out of the range of most monitors but may have been recorded by your digital sensor, Adobe uses a virtual space or ‘working space’ instead of a monitor space for editing digital images. This gives Photoshop the ability to edit more colors than you can see on your screen. When importing images into Photoshop you may like to convert the images to a working space that is optimized for either print or screen viewing. The choices are:

Adobe RGB for print.

sRGB for screen.

ProPhoto for fine print (printing that makes use of an extended color gamut, e.g inkjet printers using more than six inks).

Note > In Photoshop Lightroom images are only tagged with a working space profile when they are exported or uploaded to the web.