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Colour Management & ICC Profiles « Back to contributor support page The information below is intended as a guide to help ensure that your photos look the way you expect once they are uploaded to crestock.com. This section is particularly aimed at photographers who already know the basics of colour management. Colour management is a complex field that we won't attempt to summarise in full here, there are many good resources already available on the internet, including the tutorials at www.cambridgeincolour.com. sRGB vs. Adobe RGB In short, the sRGB colour space was devised to enable colors and photos to be displayed as consistently as possible on a variety of computer monitors. This is the standard colour space for images on the internet. Photos with an Adobe RGB or other 'large-gammut' icc profile will often appear desaturated and 'flat' when displayed in a web browser. For photographers using colour spaces other than sRGB, we recommend converting the final images to sRGB prior to upload. This will ensure that the images look the way they were intended to when viewed online.The Adobe RGB colour space is the most commonly used 'wide gamut colour space', capable of retaining a wider range of colour tones than sRGB. (Other common wide gammut colour spaces include ProPhoto RGB) It is therefore the preferred standard working space for many photographers. The downside is that most web browsers are not capable of colour management, which is to say that they ignore any colour profile information embedded in image files. Unless your images are in sRGB colour mode they will consequently very often appear different in density and/or saturation from how they displayed in you image editing software. Here's an example of sRGB and Adobe RGB images when viewed online: An sRGB image (identical to the original)  The same image in Adobe RGB (pale, low contrast) Using colour profilesMost digital cameras use the sRGB colour space by default, but if you use a digital SLR or 'prosumer' compact, you will probably also have the option of recording images in the Adobe RGB colour space. If you shoot in RAW format, your raw file conversion software will probably give you the option of working in different colour spaces, including Adobe RGB and sRGB. Most images do not utilise the full colour range of their chosen colour space, so only a small percentage of images that contain vivid green or cyan hues would benefit from the extended gamut of the Adobe RGB colour space. For many printing processes the gamut (or colour range) will be much smaller than both the sRGB and the Adobe RGB colour spaces; in this case the difference in colour space chosen would not affect the final printed result at all. This particular image contains bright red, purple and bright green tones that cannot be perfectly reproduced by 4 colour process offset printing:  Gammut warning: the gray areas show colours that cannot be reproduced faithfully in print.  The colour saturation of the image when converted to CMYK colour. |