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Author Topic: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic  (Read 124384 times)

Tony Jay

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #380 on: August 27, 2014, 01:08:51 am »

OK we made prints!  There was a visible difference in the AdobeRGB file printed on AdobeRGB dry process.  The AdobeRGB had richer saturation, visibly richer saturation.  The AdobeRGB printed on sRGB of course had duller colors, as one would expect.  So, in order of color richness, it was 1)AdobeRGB, 2) sRGB and 3) AdobeRGB on sRGB.

This is exactly what I expected, as I mentioned in the video.  The AdobeRGB is the choice IF you have the equipment to express it.  To go further,

We also did a number of web tests with both Windows and Macs.  At the lab, they had a wide gamut monitor, and I have a Mac Thunderbolt monitor.  On Safari for Mac, AdobeRGB looked better than sRGB, but on Windows it looked worse.  On Firefox and Chrome on both formats, the AdobeRGB looked worse.

We're now doing tests on our mobile devices and uploads to Facebook.  I will do a video on YouTube to show all of these results.

One thing that is probably going to drive people crazy is that if a photographer wants to show their images in the best presentation, there almost should be a button on their websites to redirect to the "Safari for Mac" version of the website, because as far as I can tell, it is the only color aware browser. 

Windows Safari says it is, but the AdobeRGB image looked visibly more dull.
Honestly this is just like watching endless reruns of the planes flying into the World Trade Centre on 9/11.
The disaster never gets any better only more nauseating and stressful with each run.

Tony Jay
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Czornyj

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #381 on: August 27, 2014, 02:20:50 am »

There are a number of color managed browsers (such as FireFox) but you have to configure color management which obviously you didn't do.

...and profile the display :D OSX reads chromatic coordinates of the connected display from EDID, automatically creates profile and assigns it to the device in color sync settings. Windows is not that smart.
« Last Edit: August 27, 2014, 02:22:29 am by Czornyj »
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GWGill

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #382 on: August 27, 2014, 04:19:54 am »

Firefox is fully color management capable in windows and Mac. The issue is that it is not enabled by default and the setting is not straightforward.
Beware - it uses a retarded, unmaintained color engine, so can't handle all ICC profile types.
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Bart_van_der_Wolf

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #383 on: August 27, 2014, 04:35:49 am »

Mark,

I looked at your Monte Carlo method and found it ingenious. Somewhat off topic remarks are the most valuable parts of this thread.

+1

Cheers,
Bart
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Bart_van_der_Wolf

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #384 on: August 27, 2014, 04:39:24 am »

Beware - it uses a retarded, unmaintained color engine, so can't handle all ICC profile types.

References? It allows the detection and activation of ICC version 2 and 4 profiles, so which ones does it not handle?

Cheers,
Bart
« Last Edit: August 27, 2014, 05:26:29 am by BartvanderWolf »
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fdisilvestro

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #385 on: August 27, 2014, 05:10:45 am »

Beware - it uses a retarded, unmaintained color engine, so can't handle all ICC profile types.


Thanks for the info. I googled around about it. Do they still use their own qcms?

GWGill

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #386 on: August 27, 2014, 06:50:49 am »

Do they still use their own qcms?
As far as I'm aware, yes. Switching back to lcms would be the smart thing to do...
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D Fosse

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #387 on: August 27, 2014, 07:02:26 am »

Beware - it uses a retarded, unmaintained color engine, so can't handle all ICC profile types.


Not in my experience. Firefox has always displayed perfectly here, with all types of profiles.

To test, I just made a v4 LUT display profile in ColorNavigator (for a CG 246), and compared Photoshop and Firefox:
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Simon Garrett

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #388 on: August 27, 2014, 07:07:47 am »

As far as I'm aware, yes. Switching back to lcms would be the smart thing to do...
I seem to recall this was fanatically and bitterly argued over on the Firefox forum a couple of years ago.  I can't remember the arguments, which were little to do with the quality of the colour management, but the Firefox team had made a decision, for some reason lcms wouldn't work in the latest Firefox, and they weren't going spend time fixing it.  

The thing with colour management: it would appear that only about 0.0000000000000000000001% of browser users care about colour management, and the people that write browser software regard it as kind of nice to have, but couldn't really give a toss.  

Consider Microsoft: they have people that know all about colour management, and they designed the Windows Color System (WCS) to provide a fairly sophisticated colour management system, but some 8 years later the Internet Explorer team still can't be bothered to implement colour management properly in Internet Explorer.  It never gets to the top 100 in the list of issues to be fixed.

I reckon the only thing that will change things could be the use of 4k wide-gamut monitors, where suddenly colour management does matter, and has to be done automatically so that even the likes of Gary Fong don't need to understand it to make it work. 
« Last Edit: August 27, 2014, 07:11:15 am by Simon Garrett »
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GWGill

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #389 on: August 27, 2014, 08:24:53 am »

for some reason lcms wouldn't work in the latest Firefox, and they weren't going spend time fixing it.  
It's rubbish that it wouldn't work. There was a purported security bug (quickly fixed by Marti), and some concerns over speed for the common case that lcms2 addressed.
Quote
The thing with colour management: it would appear that only about 0.0000000000000000000001% of browser users care about colour management, and the people that write browser software regard it as kind of nice to have, but couldn't really give a toss.
That's pretty much the case for most applications and platforms. Most programmers don't know much about color (RGB is RGB, right ?), and aren't that interested in a complex subject. Understanding it and getting it right takes a bit of effort.
Quote
Consider Microsoft: they have people that know all about colour management, and they designed the Windows Color System (WCS) to provide a fairly sophisticated colour management system, but some 8 years later the Internet Explorer team still can't be bothered to implement colour management properly in Internet Explorer.  It never gets to the top 100 in the list of issues to be fixed.
It comes down to fashion and personalities. For a while someone with some weight to throw around in MS decided that they needed to catch up with Apple, and invested money and resources in collecting a capable team and doing something new. The project was completed, and then the management attention shifted to other things (or people principally behind it fell out of favor - etc.), so the project was reduced to maintanence status. Similar things seem to have happened at Apple. Once upon a time, being the creative persons platform of choice was important to Apple so they put effort into things like Color. Now they are a mobile platform company, they don't even document their color API's, and their mobile platform doesn't have color management.
Quote
I reckon the only thing that will change things could be the use of 4k wide-gamut monitors, where suddenly colour management does matter, and has to be done automatically so that even the likes of Gary Fong don't need to understand it to make it work. 
I'm not sure 4K will make much difference - it seems like another fad with the same goals as "3D" - to sell more TV's, but it is likely to founder on the same rocks - lack of media (or even a means of delivering it) that makes use of the capabilities.
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GWGill

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #390 on: August 27, 2014, 08:49:30 am »

Not in my experience. Firefox has always displayed perfectly here, with all types of profiles.
It looks like they may have added cLUT support, but there certainly was a problem after qcms replaced lcms - see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=538114.

It's still a complete mystery as to why they want to maintain their own version of the wheel, rather than contributing fixes and improvements to lcms.

(These may be of interest too - http://www.freelists.org/post/argyllcms/Firefox-qcms-vs-lcms-vs-Argyll-imdi
 and http://www.freelists.org/post/argyllcms/Firefox-qcms-vs-lcms-20-vs-Argyll-imdi )
« Last Edit: August 27, 2014, 09:24:29 pm by GWGill »
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digitaldog

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #391 on: August 27, 2014, 10:32:55 am »

The AdobeRGB printed on sRGB of course had duller colors, as one would expect.
The AdobeRGB is the choice IF you have the equipment to express it.
You and Will don't understand cause and effect nor proper color management workflows. Let me try once again using photo analogies because I keep hearing I'm wrong because I'm not a professional photographer. Maybe this will make sense to you and Will. The statements below are as factually incorrect about photography, cause and effect for issues (wrong handling of the process) as you propose about the use of Adobe RGB (1998).

Quote
If you shoot hand-held with a 400mm lens at 1/5th of a second, the image will be blury (appear wrong) because of the rotation of the Earth.

If you use an Incident meter and place your hand over the dome while taking a reading, the exposure will be wrong because of the heat of your hand and it's effect on the electronics.

If you shoot Daylight balanced film indoors with Tungsten lighting, it will have an orange color cast because you likely wore a red shirt, or due to the reflection of your skin.

If you process E6 film in D76, you will get the wrong processing and color due to a lack of agitation.  

Here is what you hoped to say and I hoped you understand.

If you send Adobe RGB to a print path that expects sRGB for conversion to the output color space, you'll get poor results.

Simple as that Will and Gary. Print path means whatever steps, (driver, handling), is used to send the data to the printer. Do you believe that an Epson inkjet is an RGB printer? Despite how all such subtractive printers work and the names of the inks? Guess what happens if you send CMYK data to the Epson driver. You got an ugly (wrong) print because that print path expects RGB data. That doesn't make the Epson an RGB printer nor is any of the devices you used an sRGB printer. You can take the same Epson, place another print path (ImagePrint that Will mentioned and I'm certain is embarrassing the fine people there), you CAN send CMYK data to that Epson. The Epson itself didn't all of a sudden become a CMYK instead of sRGB printer any more than using a different front end with a Frontier allows one to send something other than sRGB previously made it an sRGB printer. There is no such beast.

You got the bit about the two ends of the spectrum representing two color spaces wrong (they absolutely do not have the same colors). You got the bit about numbers wrong, Will was even worse saying the distance between pixels is whatever, farther apart or something. Hard to understand with all his rambling. Stating: The AdobeRGB is the choice IF you have the equipment to express it is as incorrect as any of the photo analogy misinformation posted above.
« Last Edit: August 27, 2014, 10:39:20 am by digitaldog »
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Eyeball

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #392 on: August 27, 2014, 12:01:16 pm »

Beware - it uses a retarded, unmaintained color engine, so can't handle all ICC profile types.


Firefox is my go-to browser but I ran across some profiles recently that it would refuse to use.
- One was a stock profile for my Benq monitor (v2, stock from Benq, no errors in Profile Inspector).
- The other was the CX_Monitor_weird profile on the colorwiki (v2, only error is internal/external name mismatch).

Photoshop happily recognized both.

Perhaps some of the FF color engine deficiencies you are referring to could be the cause?
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bjanes

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Re: Revised post
« Reply #393 on: August 27, 2014, 03:16:10 pm »

You and Will don't understand cause and effect nor proper color management workflows. Let me try once again using photo analogies because I keep hearing I'm wrong because I'm not a professional photographer. Maybe this will make sense to you and Will. The statements below are as factually incorrect about photography, cause and effect for issues (wrong handling of the process) as you propose about the use of Adobe RGB (1998).

Here is what you hoped to say and I hoped you understand.

If you send Adobe RGB to a print path that expects sRGB for conversion to the output color space, you'll get poor results.

Simple as that Will and Gary. Print path means whatever steps, (driver, handling), is used to send the data to the printer. Do you believe that an Epson inkjet is an RGB printer? Despite how all such subtractive printers work and the names of the inks? Guess what happens if you send CMYK data to the Epson driver. You got an ugly (wrong) print because that print path expects RGB data. That doesn't make the Epson an RGB printer nor is any of the devices you used an sRGB printer. You can take the same Epson, place another print path (ImagePrint that Will mentioned and I'm certain is embarrassing the fine people there), you CAN send CMYK data to that Epson. The Epson itself didn't all of a sudden become a CMYK instead of sRGB printer any more than using a different front end with a Frontier allows one to send something other than sRGB previously made it an sRGB printer. There is no such beast.

While awaiting the publication of Mr. Fong’s tests, I decided to conduct my own tests using the Fuji Frontier LP7700 printing on Fuji Crystal Archive paper. As the Digitaldog, Jeff Schewe, and other knowledgeable forum members have pointed out, the test image would have to possess a gamut larger than sRGB for the tests to be meaningful. Otherwise the results would  be the same if proper color management is employed. I chose an image of some colorful flowers that was rendered into ProPhotoRGB. The gamut is considerably larger than sRGB and Adobe RGB.

I converted to sRGB, Adobe RGB, and the native space of the printer using the profile downloaded from Drycreek.com. I then uploaded the images to Costco. In one set, I requested that no adjustments be performed; another set was submitted for automatic adjustments. I ordered 4x6 inch prints. The results were indistinguishable between the auto adjusted prints and those with no adjustments.

Here is the image in sRGB for web viewing. There is some blocking up of the yellows in the center of the image and the petals of some of the red flowers on the right, but the image looked reasonably good on my profiled NEC PA241w.



The scanned images of the resulting prints are shown here. The areas where some of the highlights are blocked are circled.



The sRGB and Adobe RGB images are quite vivid, but the highlights in the yellows and reds are blocked up and show no detail. The blocked up highlights or the reds are outlined. As expected, the ProPhotoRGB image is less saturated and appears similar to the image with the Drycreek profile.

Colorthink plots of the image and color spaces helps clarify the situation. The colored solid is the sRGB gamut and the printer profile gamut is in white, but shows color from the overlying sRGB plot with reduced opacity to allow the printer profile plot to show through. The image colors are shown by the dots, and the high illuminance yellows as well as mid-illuminance reds are out of gamut for both spaces. The sRGB gamut is actually larger than that of the printer. Profile inspector shows that the gamut of the printer is 396,814 cubic ΔEs as shown. The sRGB gamut is 832,478. The printer can’t reproduce the high illuminance saturated colors. However, the shapes of the gamuts are different, and some areas of the printer gamut are outside of sRGB and these colors would be clipped when sending sRGB to the printer.



Here is the gamut of the printer:



From this test, I conclude that sending sRGB images to this printer can lead to blocked highlights when the gamut of the image exceeds that of the printer. With most shots, this wouldn’t occur, but occurs frequently when dealing with colorful flowers. In such cased, one should render into ProPhotoRGB and convert to the printer space. Perceptual rendering could be tried (it is not available with sRGB unless one is using the ver 4 profile as Jeff described. Sending a ProPhotoRGB image to the printer actually gives a better result! In this case, the soft proof accurately depicted the image with the printer profile. The colors are more muted, but one could edit the image to increase saturation until the highlights become unacceptably blocked up. In my experience, it is often best to allow some clipping as long as important tonal gradations are not lost.

My conclusions:
•   The Frontier is not one of Mr. Fong’s sRGB printers.
•   sRGB is not the optimal space in which to send images to this printer.
•   One should use the supplied profile and edit with soft proofing to obtain optimal color. ProPhotoRGB is the preferred working space.

Comments on this post are welcome for my benefit and that of others who are not color management experts.

Bill

ps

This post was modified to add a missing image of the scanned photos. 5:00 pm CDT, August 27
« Last Edit: August 27, 2014, 05:59:42 pm by bjanes »
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digitaldog

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #394 on: August 27, 2014, 03:25:56 pm »

Can't see any of your images Bill.
As the Digitaldog, Jeff Schewe, and other knowledgeable forum members have pointed out, the test image would have to possess a gamut larger than sRGB for the tests to be meaningful.
I want to be as fair to Gary as possible in context of his tests which we haven't seen and the target he said he'd use. After watching his video again last night to quote is mangling of the topic, I noticed he used the ColorChecker SG. I have to wonder if that's the target he is using for his new video, not as he describes, the ColorChecker (24 patch) which as pointed out, only has one color outside sRGB. That target would be totally inappropriate for the tests he did. Again, to be fair to Gary, the SG would be a better target than the 24 patch ColorChecker but I also think the tests would still be flawed and better had he used real world subjects as part of the test. Much like I'm going to assume you used (when I can see the images  ;D)

I suppose until we see the video, we can only guess, based on Gary's 'quick and dirty' language (he's consistent) that the ColorChecker SG instead of the ColorChecker was used. It illustrates again how being less than accurate in discussing this complex subject is risky.
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digitaldog

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #395 on: August 27, 2014, 03:27:31 pm »

Update, I now see the images Bill.
Curious what rendering intent was used for the print output color space? Did you even have a choice?
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MarkM

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #396 on: August 27, 2014, 03:40:33 pm »

That's a really good example of the problems and solutions. One image that didn't show up inline in your post that really demonstrates the difficulty is the last one with the four scans: http://bjanes.smugmug.com/Costco-Gamut/i-RjcpcFc

Also, it would be interesting to see the original proPhotoRGB image itself. It would also be interesting to see what happens if you shot it in sRGB as a jpeg — do the camera's internal conversions handle the clipped colors more gracefully than the colorimetric conversions?
« Last Edit: August 27, 2014, 03:43:28 pm by MarkM »
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aaronchan

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #397 on: August 27, 2014, 03:44:22 pm »

I've just post a status, tagged Tom P Ashe, Katrin Eismann and X-Rite Photo to see if I can get any responses of "Is Will Crockett a real Coloratti?". Hope I can get an answer by X-Rite representative.

Aaron

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #398 on: August 27, 2014, 03:46:15 pm »

•   sRGB is not the optimal space in which to send images to this printer.
With the exception of a print path that demands sRGB for convention to the output color space, I have to wonder if sRGB would be optimal for ANY printer.
If Gary were able to conduct such tests to uncover this, that would be an interesting data point.
« Last Edit: August 27, 2014, 03:47:56 pm by digitaldog »
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aaronchan

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Re: sRGB vs. Adobe RGB: New color management stand up comic
« Reply #399 on: August 27, 2014, 04:03:36 pm »

With the exception of a print path that demands sRGB for convention to the output color space, I have to wonder if sRGB would be optimal for ANY printer.
If Gary were able to conduct such tests to uncover this, that would be an interesting data point.

This test recalled my memories. Back in the day when we were in school, we have done a similar test with Adorama when they were starting their printing business. I kind of remembered we have sent sRGB, aRGB and an image converted into their printer profile. At the end, all I remember is the one with their profile came to the winning position, the whole class agreed with that. And the instructor was kind of agreed that but he also comment the software of their machine is not quite logical when it comes to color management. But he also said, well, as long as you get the good print, and you don't have to invest hundred thousand dollars to buy a machine, spending a few bulks to know how to get a decent one, why not. Not everyone is doing correctly, even you think they are, sometimes.
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