What colour space are folks using for Lr on a Mac?

[JustinO]

Hi all, 

Prior to April, I was using LR on a Windows laptop, and the screen was calibrated in sRGB.  I was processing and exporting in sRGB in Lr, so there was no change in what I was seeing in LR when I exported to disk, or posted.

I recently went to Mac (work reasons, but I also wanted a better display quality).  My Mac is set to use display P3, and that (or Image P3) is my chosen colour space in Ps and Lr. I find this gives a lot of extra colour particularly on reds, oranges and greens  (Nembrotha kubaryana look really good!).  I then export in sRGB, where I've found the colours suddenly look a little duller and lack a bit of wow.  

I spent far too much time trying to read up on what i should be doing last weekend ... and the internet advice was as contradictory as ever. I note that sRGB has much less gamut than p3, but are there any tips folks have found when using Lr on a Mac to keep the great colours we see on our screens, and make sure others can enjoy them too (both on screen and in print)?

Are people setting Mac workspace to sRGB (and losing the ability to adjust screen brightness) and doing the same in Lr and Ps? More adjustment to Vibrance?  Exporting with embedded colour profile? 

Any tips and drawbacks from one approach or another gratefully received - thanks in advance. 

 

[Chris Ross]

The basic problem with sRGB is that is a smaller colour space than others available, it was built around what CRT monitors could do at the time.  The problem I see regularly when processing and converting to sRGB to produce a web version is that the blues in reef shots go off.  You can remedy this a bit using the selective colour tool in photoshop adding a lot of cyan to the blues and playing with magenta in cyans and blues but it's not perfect.  Don't know if LR has a similar tool.

 

The reason for converting to sRGB is solely due to the default behaviour of browsers when serving the image - if colour management is not enabled they assume the image is sRGB and if you post for example an Adobe RGB image if does weird things to the colours.

 

I'm not sure what the current situation with browsers is, a few years ago it was a bit of a mess, I think most browsers are now colour managed, but necessarily on by default.

 

what to do?  depends on what you are doing with your images!  If posting to Facebook, to some extent it doesn't matter as FB strips profiles and re-processes the image to it's own profile(saves a few kB of storage - a lot spread over millions of images).  Instagram probably does something similar.

 

You could save in adobe RGB and I think nowadays Chrome, Edge and Firefox and possibly Safari will render that correctly.  Adobe RGB is a good choice I think as a great many monitors can display that these days.  Going on percentages I would guess 95% of people will see a correctly rendered image on their setup these days if it's in Adobe RGB  (ignoring the gamut their monitor is capable of) .  There would not be many people on older versions as Windows forces updates on most people and Edge updates along with it.  Plus among non-photographers most probably won't notice the colours being off a bit.

[JustinO]

Thanks Chris, will give that a go. Interestingly,  I see that quite a few sites specify sRGB as the profile, presumably to save a few bytes of space. So perhaps might also be worth embedding the original profile in as well to enable correct rendering by browsers.   

[canislupus]

As far as I know, many online stock image agencies use sRGB when downloading a jpg file.

If you upload an image with a different color space they convert to sRGB.

Keep that in mind.

I can’t help with MAC because I’m not a MAC user.

[Architeuthis]

18 hours ago, JustinO said:

Hi all, 

Prior to April, I was using LR on a Windows laptop, and the screen was calibrated in sRGB.  I was processing and exporting in sRGB in Lr, so there was no change in what I was seeing in LR when I exported to disk, or posted.

I recently went to Mac (work reasons, but I also wanted a better display quality).  My Mac is set to use display P3, and that (or Image P3) is my chosen colour space in Ps and Lr. I find this gives a lot of extra colour particularly on reds, oranges and greens  (Nembrotha kubaryana look really good!).  I then export in sRGB, where I've found the colours suddenly look a little duller and lack a bit of wow.  

I spent far too much time trying to read up on what i should be doing last weekend ... and the internet advice was as contradictory as ever. I note that sRGB has much less gamut than p3, but are there any tips folks have found when using Lr on a Mac to keep the great colours we see on our screens, and make sure others can enjoy them too (both on screen and in print)?

Are people setting Mac workspace to sRGB (and losing the ability to adjust screen brightness) and doing the same in Lr and Ps? More adjustment to Vibrance?  Exporting with embedded colour profile? 

Any tips and drawbacks from one approach or another gratefully received - thanks in advance. 

 

 

Hi Justin,

 

My approach is not to squeeze out the maximum colors of an existing monitor, but that the colors I see on the monitor during processing in LR and PS should (ideally) be reproduced the same way when the photos are viewed/printed at the end...

I view the photos at home on a BenQ 2k beamer and most printing is done for an annual calender that I give to family/friends for Christmas. Seldom some magazine or a big print for the wall. All these end users are able for just for sRGB (as is the internet) and in order to avoid unpleasant surprise, it is better to supply them with calibrated sRGB images...

 

I have a monitor here (BenQ SW270c) that I calibrate from time to time, both in sRGB and aRGB, and I can toggle between sRGB and aRGB (maybe some (remote) day I may be invited to upload an image to a high quality aRGB print medium and then the aRGB option will come into the play...)...

 

Since I switched to edit everything in calibrated sRGB, the final output on the beamer and also on the prints look much more like I see them on my screen...

 

 

 

Wolfgang

Edited October 26 by Architeuthis

[JustinO]

Thanks Wolfgang! 

Increasingly seems like I shall have to retire my old laptop and just look at them on my Mac; even in sRGB on the Mac they still look better in sRGB than they do on the laptop. Thanks for the tip on the BenQ... I'd been quietly coveting one of those.. just need an excuse to pull the trigger on one...

[Chris Ross]

13 hours ago, JustinO said:

Thanks Chris, will give that a go. Interestingly,  I see that quite a few sites specify sRGB as the profile, presumably to save a few bytes of space. So perhaps might also be worth embedding the original profile in as well to enable correct rendering by browsers.   

The image will either be sRGB or Adobe RGB, whether you want to use one or the other as I said is down to how the images will be used.  If you are using the Lightroom, you can keep the Master image in AdobeRGB and export in sRGB, once you have produced an sRGB image there's no going back on that file.

 

I also don't believe you need to have two different calibrations for your monitors, a monitor calibrated in AdobeRGB will render an sRGB image just fine, it just doesn't use all the colour space it is capable of.  If you want to work in sRGB to avoid the change when the image is converted just start your processing in sRGB.  I think it's approaching the time when publishing in Adobe RGB will work for many people.  If you entering competitions then I would certainly want to work in AdobeRGB and also if ever you were printing on a high end inkjet printer, their colour gamut is certainly bigger than sRGB and you would be missing out on those extra colours.

 

When you are working in lightroom, the raw image doesn't have a colour space and tell it what colour space to use when you start the processing.  You can then process and export the image and the conversion to sRGB can be done then.  I use Photoshop which is a little different so I keep a full resolution Adobe RGB master and make a web version in sRGB.