# School me on color settings in Photoshop CS3



## sincere (Apr 6, 2008)

Whats the best setting? Wich one shows the most colors? Right now i have it on Adobe RGB 1998.

Someone school me please. Thanks!


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## dkf10425 (Apr 6, 2008)

I have heard that Prophoto RGB has the largest color gamut. However I'm not educated enough about it to really speak on it. My monitor, printer, and photoshop settings are for Adobe RGB. When I save images for web I use sRGB. Make sure under "view-proof setup" you have Adobe RGB checked if your color settings are Adobe RGB. Whatever proof setup setting you have on is what photoshop will emulate. This feature is useful so you can see how your image would look under different colors settings, and on a MAC etc. Here's another tip: If you edit an image for web it will most likely look oversaturated using the "save for web" feature. 
This is due to the nature of how all browsers with the exception of Safari interpret the image. So use the "2-up" feature in "save for web" to get an accurate depication of how much oversaturation has occured and you can make an adjustment prior to web publishing.


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## ann (Apr 6, 2008)

prophoto has a larger color space, but if you don't have a color printer that can match that space i believe you will lose that advantage.

then the internet is sRGB, so it is lost there for sure.


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## skieur (Apr 6, 2008)

I think that your first order of business irrespective of Adobe RGB vs sRGB is whether you are getting accurate colour and the saturation level that you want in the camera .  Shoot beige and you will find that it may come out as white or grey.  Shoot white and it may come out blue, orange, yellow or grey.  I have seen shots in shadows that are too cool in colour temperature and night shots that are too yellow.  Purple may or may not contain the accurate amount of red in an image.

So, using an enhancement filter or polarizing filter, camera menu choices such as vivid or tweaking the colour temperature in another menu might get you closer to accurate colour.

As to printing, the standard in most labs is sRGB, so if you are using one, you should be using that format.  In a few cases you can use a 16 bit tif file but unless the printer really uses the colour advantage of this format, it does not really make a difference.

skieur


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## Helen B (Apr 7, 2008)

A brief, highly simplified reply:

sRGB is the lowest common denominator. If you want utmost simplicity, use sRGB for everything.

There are a few monitors that will display more than sRGB, but many only display sRGB. Most web browsers will assume sRGB no matter what tag the file has, so if you look at an Adobe RGB file it will look dull.

Many online printers ignore the profile and print as sRGB. 

sRGB will probably lose some of the colours your camera (or scanned film) is capable of producing, and it will lose a lot of the colours an inkjet printer can print (especially dark blue-greens and light green-yellows). An inkjet printer may not be able to reproduce all the purer blues and greens that are in the sRGB space, however.

sRGB and Adobe RGB have a similar gamut in the purer blues (so the sRGB-printer and Adobe RGB-printer mismatches are about the same), but Adobe RGB has a wider gamut in the purer greens, so the mismatch between Adobe RGB and the printer gamut is usually greatest there (compared to the sRGB-printer mismatch). Adobe RGB may, however, be very close to the printer gamut in the mid tone yellow-greens. (Remember that a basic inkjet printer uses cyan, magenta and yellow inks, so pure greens and blues have to be made from a combination of inks. The yellow is usually quite pure, the cyan and magenta are not as pure spectrally. Thus pure, saturated blues are a big problem without a blue ink)

Adobe RGB (1998) is a larger colour space, but it can't be displayed on most monitors. More and more monitors are appearing that are exceeding the sRGB gamut.

If you are interested I'll post a few graphs showing some of the stuff I've mentioned.

Edit:
ProPhoto RGB is a very large colour space. Too large to be well represented by 8 bits per channel, so 16 bits per channel is recommended.

I use Adobe RGB as my working space, and convert to sRGB for output if necessary.

Best,
Helen


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