prophoto rgb vs plain old rgb

[jann1033]

what's the diff. i have to say my photos look way better after light room ( i thought it was a placebo effect till i reprocessed some and they did look better) and the color is prophoto vs adobe? so wondering if anyone can explain it in 10 words or so what's the diff if there is any. i think pse might convert from srgb to abode(?) rgb( which i realize is part of the less saturated look i have noticed with pse) but since lightroom is also adobe wondering if it's different or if i am just using differnt slide settings since it is supposed to be the same as raw which is what i used to convert before...really wish they had a help with the beta to explain some stuff.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I know I rambled on about colorspaces once already, so I'll just post a link.

http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?p=18959682#post18959682

There is no such thing as "plain old rgb." The closest to that definition would be sRGB, because that has become the norm for web use. Old versions of Internet Explorer didn't pay attention to colorspaces and essentially assumed everything was sRGB.

Most monitors don't have a terribly wide colorspace. If your browser is colorspace aware, pictures properly translated between most colorspaces will look the same on your monitor. Even though ProPhotoRGB or AdobeRGB will allow you to work with a picture containing a wider color range than sRGB, it still has to get translated into a color range that your monitor can display. So the extra colors may be their, but you won't see them until you view your picture on a device (like a print) that can display a broader colorspace.

I've noticed that the Smugmug people and numerous others are advising people not to bother with colorspaces. Just keep everything in sRGB because you won't notice much difference. Personally, I disagree. That's true for most pictures and for most people, but if you are taking pictures of subjects with very saturated colors (particularly greens), you can get better results working with a wider colorspace. When in doubt, try playing with the Gamut Warning in Photoshop and you'll see where you might be able to get better colors.

 

[Groucho]

Remember that for JPGs, many/most viewers won't display them properly if they're not in the SRGB colorspace - they'll look a bit flat and dull. I had this problem with Lightroom for a while until I noticed that it was outputting AdobeRGB JPGs instead of SRGB - I switched it and things looked much better.

At this point, Firefox 3 and Safari are apparently the only web browsers that display alternate colorspaces properly.