Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Colour Management => Topic started by: Ben08 on December 11, 2008, 09:00:25 pm

Title: Help with grayscale profiles?
Post by: Ben08 on December 11, 2008, 09:00:25 pm

Hey All! Looking for some help with what profile to embed with grayscale images which I am sending out to people who don't know about color management. I always send out RGB images in sRGB, but is there a standard "universal default" space for grayscale? Thanks!

Title: Help with grayscale profiles?
Post by: Damo77 on January 04, 2009, 09:08:24 pm

Quote from: Ben08

Hey All! Looking for some help with what profile to embed with grayscale images which I am sending out to people who don't know about color management. I always send out RGB images in sRGB, but is there a standard "universal default" space for grayscale? Thanks!

Good question.  How will the images be used, do you know?

Title: Help with grayscale profiles?
Post by: Ben08 on January 06, 2009, 06:29:59 pm

Thanks for responding, Damo. The photos (fun shots- b&w advertising style from my teenagers birthday party) are being printed, emailed etc by a multitude of teenage party guests. Just wanted to have a reasonable chance of them looking the way I intended ( looking at them in my color controlled environment ). I ended up keeping them as   RGB (sRGB profile) images after dropping the saturation all the way down in Capture One, where I had done the captures tethered to my computer. This was easy and looked fine. The file sizes are bigger than they would have been if I had actually converted them to grayscale though. But leaving them RGB with the sRGB profile ended up seeming like the safest, most universal way to go.

Title: Help with grayscale profiles?
Post by: Damo77 on January 06, 2009, 07:53:34 pm

Yes, I'd tend to agree.  Gray Gamma 2.2 would have probably worked too, but sRGB is always the failsafe option, isn't it?

Title: Help with grayscale profiles?
Post by: Ben08 on January 08, 2009, 02:51:29 pm

Ahh! Sounds like Gray Gamma2.2 is what I was looking for. Next time I'll be all set. Thanks again for your response! --Ben

Title: Help with grayscale profiles?
Post by: digitaldog on January 08, 2009, 03:47:59 pm

Gamma settings are intended for output to video, dot gain, output to print.

That doesn't mean you can't use one for the other. But they don't correlate.

Whatever sRGB document you're sending for output will at some point undergo a color space conversion to the output device who's gamma (TRC) has nothing to do with the original's found in sRGB. For the web (video output), it works fine.

The correct answer can only be provided when we know the output.