Understanding Colour Management and Colorspaces

I discuss a variety of colour management concepts with photographer Tim Parkin. We cover colorspaces, colour conversions, calibration and general recommendations.

Tim Parkin is well known in the UK landscape photography community not just for his photography but for his technical understanding. Tim does a lot of film scanning for commercial clients and this involves some extremely complicated colour work. He's well qualified to talk us through all things Colour Management!

[JamesLanePhoto]

This was excellent; I’ve learned so much from this. Thank you Alex and Tim!

[KrushevT]

More people need to watch this. Very educational 👍

[jbairdexp]

Well put together chaps. Not always the easiest topic to break down and discuss. I'm lucky enough to own an Eizo monitor (which I calibrate on a regular basis) and I use the profiling service from Fotospeed for my Canon Pro-10s. I very rarely have any significant issues between capture and print. It's been worth the learning, time and cost. :-)

[thevalleywalker]

Enjoyed that, although maybe I didn't understand lots of it..lol. Question Alex. I have sometimes posted images to web that I have mistakenly exported from Lightroom using to the profoto colour profile and it exported as Profoto. Would that be the reason why when they have shown on the web, they looktotally wrong on my screen after posting them, washed out in some colours etc?

[Dario_Daniele]

Really interesting video, lots of useful information.

I have a couple of questions I would like to ask:

1) Is there any point at all at using an sRGB color space, if the majority of laboratories I work with are using Adobe RGB profiles for printing?
I don't see any benefit in working with sRGB if I know that my work will be reviewed according to the market standards (maybe I am wrong, but I would like to hear your thoughts);

2) I am using a MacBook Pro for editing my photos, and I typically use Adobe RGB profile. Should I switch to sRGB instead, since I am quite sure that laptop isn't enough to display the Adobe RGB gamut?

Thanks!

[kenkelchtermans]

Hi Alex, so I think I will also work in sRGB. I had trouble with a night shot of the milky way and it seemed something to to with the color space. For stacking they advise to have the pictures to be stacked in pro photo (starry landscape stacker) and I was working in photoshop on adobe RGB. It got too confusing. So I will go full sRGB.
Just another question, do you set your camera on capturing sRGB or I guess it doesn't matter as you shoot RAW?

[andrewherbert]

That was brilliant, you both made things sound quite uncomplicated, nice to see Tim its been a while

[suzannemullaney]

Thanks! Good information and it gives me a lot to ponder.

[glensumner]

Am I right in saying Lightroom's raw files won't be affected at the start of the process as they haven't a colour space assigned yet?( as I understood the choosing of colour spaces on camera pertained to jpegs which I don't use or am I wrong there) and will kick into effect when lightroom exports to another program so if I set in preferences it to export in srgb it will assign that colour space then at that point? I have until now used Profoto in ps then converted for the web and so proofed for each paper type when printing.. but am convinced to go to sRGB all the way as it where now but was wondering about the best way to implement it..

[timnevellphotography]

great content Alex & Tim, think I will move away from ProPhoto then! Thanks and keep the learning content coming please. . .