Hi,
Monitors may improve with time. Now we essentially have monitors covering Adobe RGB, and future monitors may cover even wider gamuts. Wider gamuts would probably require higher resolution of color tones like 10-bit or 12 bit. According to Karl Lang it is already an issue with Adobe RGB that one bit change can cause a significant change in tonality. For that reason some experts advocate using sRGB if the colors in the image don't fall outside sRGB.
Essentially, use sRGB for weddings and Adobe RGB for flower shots ;-)
Cameras have a pretty wide gamut (although gamut may not be the correct term) so the raw image contains a lot of colors falling outside sRGB and Adobe RGB. So once you truncate the colors in the raw image to a smaller RGB the colors falling outside are gone (If you use a parametric workflow you would always use the original image, so this doesn't apply). Printers can yield colors outside Adobe RGB, but cannot handle all colors in sRGB. Think of this as a screen having a gamut like a cube, and a printer having a gamut like a potato. A potato can be smaller (have a smaller volume) than the cube but still would not inside the cube.
Unfortunately, sRGB is established as a replacement for color managed workflow. Most people have uncalibrated screens somewhat similar to sRGB, most pictures don't have embedded profiles and most viewers do neither handle screen calibration data nor embedded profiles. So using a wide gamut image is not very feasible unless both sender and receiver know what they are doing.
If we have images in a wide color space we also need high bit file formats. The wide gamut spaces are not very efficient, much of the "binary space" is wasted on non existing or non visible colors. Converting between spaces introduces some round off errors, having more bits can help with that.
One advantage with using ProPhoto RGB is that it is quite obvious if color management is missing. With Adobe RGB you can loose profile and think it's sRGB and still get away with it.
Best regards
Erik
sorry for my ignorance, but I do not understand one point.
We have a super and safe space color to work with in 16bits, but then, wich monitor is able to
reproduce al this spectrum?
So we work in a great color space but we can not see all of it, and hardly reproduce them either.
If I understand something, the reason would be that working the file in ProPhoto RGB space, some colors that have been captured
by the camera may possibly be visible on screen, if for example onces wants to push a red.
Is that correct? Then, after pushing where you wanted, onces export in a color space that is compatible by the printer, or the web?
I do not get it.
Fred.