Hi,
This is really a sort of restart of the “A Workflow with Beta RGB” topic, but with a different slant.
I’ve been looking at a Granger Rainbow and I have to admit to being very puzzled by it as the image displayed on the monitor is not at all what I would have expected. I created the image from the instructions here:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/test-charts.shtml.
This is a photograph of what it looks like on my monitor (but no doubt it will look different on yours, even though it's converted to sRGB):
If anyone knows how to interpret this I would be very interested!
I’ve made a different sort of rainbow, using the exact same steps as for the Granger Rainbow, but instead of setting the mode of the grayscale gradient to Luminance, I set it to Hard Light, to get this:
This seems to be a more useful (or at least more understandable) spectrum, with fully saturated at the middle, going to white at the top and black at the bottom.
It’s interesting to soft-proof this image (created in Adobe RGB) with gamut-warning … and to see how much of it is out of gamut for a print profile with a very large gamut (a lot!).
Of course, when I then look at the 3D Lab plot of Adobe RGB (wireframe) against the printer profile (solid), it’s easy to see why this is:
A lot of the saturated colors in Adobe RGB are well outside the printer gamut.
Of course, with this particular paper, some of the printer gamut is also outside of the Adobe RGB gamut … but comparatively little.
What I’m getting to really is this: if the monitor gamut is nearly Adobe RGB (which mine is), and the printer gamuts are mostly within Adobe RGB, or not too far out, then I can see good reasons for using Adobe RGB as the working space and not too many good reasons for using working spaces with larger gamuts.
Essentially my argument for Adobe RGB is:
- with Adobe RGB, I will be able to see all of the colors on the monitor
- I can soft-proof to the print profile and see the effect and the OOG colors
And my argument against a larger working space like ProPhoto or Beta RGB is:
- Potentially, a lot of the colors will be un-viewable on the monitor and unprintable on the printer, and figuring out if the color is viewable but not printable, not viewable but printable, or not viewable and not printable is a mess.
- The benefit of the larger working space only applies to relatively few, very saturated colors – colors that I am personally very unlikely to ever want to print. But if I did want to give the
effect of a very saturated color then I can achieve this by using contrasting colors and tones, for example, rather than actually using the very saturated color itself (for example making a sunset look more vibrant by having some white, changing the hues of the yellows, oranges and reds etc).
I don’t see that using a large working space future-proofs for the time when wider gamut printing becomes available … simply because by then more than likely the image processing software will also have improved and I will want to rework the image anyway. And anyway, an image adjusted for a smaller gamut will need modification if it is going to be printed to make use of a wider gamut, otherwise it will likely not look right (or if it is fine with the smaller gamut then just don't touch it and it will still look the same).
I would be interested to know if you feel that I am missing some vital points here
.
Robert
