I have just read an article on Galbraith that recommends using Adobe RGB instead of sRGB as the default Windows colour space. Has anybody here tried this?
Cheers,
dave
Posted by David Bostedo on March 18, 2008 at 8:40 AM
Can you point to the article Dave? I don't think I quite understand how a Windows color space is set - I've never come across the ability to change it.
Posted by Stefan Jacobs on March 18, 2008 at 12:43 PM
Hi Dave I might have it all wrong but I think they are refering to the editing program and the colour space worked in there. If this is the case then I have worked in PhotoShop CS3 in that exact same space and if your monitor is calibrated properly it does make a difference.
Hope this helps.
Stefan.
After giving my CRT a bump it was recalibrated. While I was at it I thought I'd do the newly acquired LCD running on a dual graphics card. While they would never match close would be better.
While doing a bit of research on calibration I came across a reference in Galbraith in which the user showed how to configure Windows in AdobeRGB by altering the settings in spool\color.
While software programs will reflect the use of AdobeRGB as I hadn't heard of anybody profiling the actual monitor in the same I wanted to see if anybody else had attempted this before altering anything.
Dave
Posted by Susie Hopkins on March 18, 2008 at 4:11 PM
My monitor profiles had AdobeRGB and so I choose that when I calibrated and also did the same with my editing software which is Photoshop 7. My camera still uses the sRGB profile and things seem to work together just fine.. Prints come out as I see them on my screen. I also tell Photoshop to ignore the color profile and use the selected one when I open a new file. My photo lab connection says sRGB and AdobeRGB profiles are quite similar.. If what I'm doing is a problem, plz someone correct me.. If not. I hope this helps..
Posted by David Bostedo on March 18, 2008 at 4:29 PM
David - I have that utility installed and it's pretty cool and simply laid out. I'd recommend it just for the cool factor, aside from the utility it provides. I'd really like to see that article on configuring Windows in AdobeRGB. I'm not sure exactly why you'd want to do it.
I'm assuming you mean that you can configure Windows so that it interprets colors as though they are Adobe RGB, rather than the "default" of sRGB (or something close to it). Theoretically, a calibrated monitor is displaying as close to the standard as it can. I think this would be true during calibration whether the monitor/graphics card/OS is using sRGB interpretation, or Adobe RGB. I do wonder if a graphics card/OS can accomodate this interpretation and still calibrate OK. I don't think I understand the underlying mechanics of calibration well enough to really help, but I can try (or at least ask a lot more questions about what I don't understand ).
At a basic level, when the calibration software displays a color patch, it adjusts how the monitor displays so that the patch matches whatever the standard is for that color. Doesn't it have to assume which colorspace you are starting with? For instance, an RGB number set, like 15,83,157, is a different color in sRGB than it is in AdobeRGB. It seems like the calibration software would have to know which you are using, in order to know what color it is trying to standardize. If you make that RGB number set look the same regardless of the underlying interpretation, I wonder if the software will have a problem matching it.
I'm thinking of two possible problems other than that :
1) I'm wondering what happens in applications. Do you have a double profile problem in PS? Assume you have an Adobe RGB PSD. I know that PS interprets the color info in the file as Adobe RGB, and converts it so that it displays properly.
I'm not sure exactly how that works though - is there an assumption of sRGB in there somewhere? Does it convert to sRGB, assuming that's what Windows is using, and you no longer are - which means your colors are inaccurate? Do you just turn off color management in PS when using AdobeRGB files?
2) The other potential problem is that AdobeRGB probably contains colors that your monitor isn't capable of showing. While this means that photos can already contain colors your monitor can't show, at least previously, they were translated such that your monitor could display them. I wonder how the monitor will clip colors now if you are using AdobeRGB as the base for Windows? Maybe this isn't a problem, and no different than the clipping that occurs now when displaying large color spaces on a monitor.
My monitor profiles had AdobeRGB and so I choose that when I calibrated and also did the same with my editing software which is Photoshop 7.
Actually, your profiling software should automatically assign the profile it creates as the default monitor profile. ARGB is a color space, not a profile.
My photo lab connection says sRGB and AdobeRGB profiles are quite similar..
Not "quite" similar. See this comparison of sRGB and ARGB color spaces to view the differences.
If what I'm doing is a problem, plz someone correct me.
Your color management seems a bit unorthodox, but if your prints closely match what you see on your screen, then who's to argue?
Well, I'll add that there is a difference between sRGB and AdobeRGB. If you are going to get heavy in photography, you really need to understand the difference and when to use each. As to calibration, there are various packages out there that will do this for you (though you do have to provide input). Ideally, and if you are rich, you would purchase the hardware and software that will calibrate everything in your work flow...different monitors, printers, scanners, etc so that they will ALL match each other.
There are serious issues involved in calibration and there are differences between PC monitors and Apple monitors. Many images dealt with on a Mac will look darker on a PC when using certain browsers. And you print an image and someone else prints it and they look different. It is a nightmare. If you are doing your own printing and it looks like your screen, then you can't ask for much more. The getcha is that it may look super on your screen and very different on someone elses screen. You just can't solve this for everyone. The best you can do is calibrate your systems to known standards and know when to use each format. That is as close as it can get.
Troup
Posted by David Bostedo on March 19, 2008 at 9:44 AM
Troup - I don't think the difference is between PC and Apple monitors - rather it's likely either a gamma difference between the operating systems (Mac defaults to 1.8, Windows to 2.2) or a difference in using Safari on Mac (which is color managed) and just about any other browser, which aren't color managed.
As far as sRGB vs AdobeRGB, there is definitely a fairly significant difference, as has been shown. However, for most people, they probably wouldn't care or notice. As Troup said, when you get picky and really get into printing and caring about gamut, it can make a difference, but only if your image has colors that fall outside the gamut of sRGB.
Susie - Sounds like you might be making things more awkward than they need to be. Here's a couple of issues :
1) If your camera is capable of capturing in Adobe RGB, and you're using sRGB (which JPGs always are), then you aren't capturing all the very saturated colors that your camera is capable of. If you're shooting RAW or TIFF, you probably have the option to use a different color space. (Well with RAW, you can pick whatever you want in the converter I think.)
2) If you are ignoring the sRGB profile and editing in AdobeRGB, you're probably introducing color shifts because you're now taking sRGB color numbers and reading them as AdobeRGB. Perhaps then you're needing to do more color editing than you otherwise would? What really should happen is that you should open the image with sRGB and convert it AdobeRGB. This will translate the color data to try to match sRGB, but with AdobeRGB numbers.
Anyway, after all that, does anyone have an explanation for how Windows color space, your monitor profile, and PS color spaces all work together?
Posted by David Bostedo on March 19, 2008 at 10:03 AM
Posted by Toni Lankerd on March 19, 2008 at 11:30 AM
I shoot in RAW and have the color space on my camera set for sRGB, which gives me the best color output in my images. Using PS7, the working space is set for sRGB, and when I edit my images, it's done in RGB color. For about a week, not long ago, I noticed a shift in colors on my images...mainly the contrast and saturation...after posting images to the forums. Trying to figure out why this was happening, a friend told me to check the Color Settings in PS 7..sure enough, somehow the working space had been changed to Adobe RGB!
Calibrating my monitor has made a difference in the way the monitor displays the images and the way the prints now look coming back from the lab...they now match!
Posted by David Bostedo on March 19, 2008 at 12:58 PM
That makes perfect sense, Toni, since PS7 started reading the color information as belonging to a different color space. This is what I was talking about with Susie taking sRGB images and editing them in AdobeRGB without converting - it will cause color shifts, although they may be minor, depending on your level of pickiness.
That DPReview thread I posted before is pretty enlightening on the "Windows in native AdobeRGB" issue. I've also gotten some clarification from some guys on NSN. If calibration works properly (if it doesn't assume sRGB and actually is aware of the OS color space) then PS should be fine with it's normal color management. It will convert the image working space based on the monitor profile (which should be based on the OS color space).
I don't know about other apps, especially browsers, which aren't color managed. All the color info is now going to be translated as though it's AdobeRGB, when it was probably created with something like sRGB. The most obvious place I think this would show up would be in web images, that are usually either assumed to be sRGB, or are actually tagged with sRGB. Sometimes on forums you'll see someone who complains about washed out images because they posted an AdobeRGB image and are viewing it in sRGB. If Windows color space was changed to AdobeRGB you'd have the reverse - sRGB web images viewed in AdobeRGB, which would probably have a similar negative effect.
Posted by Susie Hopkins on March 20, 2008 at 2:47 PM
Well huh.............. I'll have to do some reading and studyin' I guess. Just for the record the Profile I chose for my monitor was AdobeRGB1998. An ICC Profile.. See screenshot.. Go to address I left below. I did rename it to Adobe Monitor Profile when I calibrated... I have a CRT monitor.. Funny I don't have any color shift problems.. What I see on camera all the way to print is the same.. When I open a file in PS I have the 'Discard the embedded profile(don't color manage)' checked.. When I get prints they are done in sRGB. Works for me....
Posted by David Bostedo on March 20, 2008 at 4:16 PM
Susie - There are a couple of problems/sources of confusion here. First, color spaces and profiles are both stored in that directory as ".icm" files and ".icc" files - which probably both show up as "ICC Profiles" in the file type dialog (although I'm not sure about that). "Adobe RGB 1998" is a color space, and can't really be used as a profile. A color space defines a total range of possible colors (called the "gamut"). A monitor profile tells Windows how to translate colors from a standard for proper display on the screen.
I'm assuming from your link that you are using Adobe Gamma to visually calibrate your monitor? At the end of that process it saves your profile to the name you specify, then loads it each time you start Windows. When you say "chose for my monitor profile", what step are you talking about? Did you save your monitor profile to the name "AdobeRGB 1998"? Or did you type that as the name to start with?
If, in Adobe Gamma, you saved your monitor profile as "AdobeRGB 1998" you probably overwrote your Adobe RGB color space file with your monitor profile. If you just typed that name at the begining, and saved it to another file (like "Adobe Monitor Profile" maybe?) then you're probably fine, and you are actually loading that profile when Windows starts. If you happened to give it the same name as the real Adobe RGB color space, it may be possible that PS is pulling that file rather than the real Adobe RGB color space. That might depend on the file name extension though (.icm vs .icc) but I can't see what yours are.
It's better practice to run through Adobe Gamma and at the end give it a descriptive name, like "my monitor profile 031908" or something. That way you don't interfere with any other installed files.
Also keep in mind that the color shifts we're talking about are really pretty small to a lot of people - different levels of saturation, some really bright color clipping, slight changes in contrast. I don't think anyone I know who isn't into photography or graphics design would really notice them without me pointing them out.
Your comment "Troup - I don't think the difference is between PC and Apple monitors - rather it's likely either a gamma difference between the operating systems (Mac defaults to 1.8, Windows to 2.2)" is right on.
I was afraid to get to deep in to it. I recently ran across an article that states that even Apple is recommending changing the Mac gamma to 2.2 even though they still ship OS-X with 1.8 as the default.
And in regards to Safari, the article actually showed the differences between colors where a certain number color was not the same color. The fix was to change the Mac to 2.2 gamma. So, this was Safari and gamma issue. I could get the magazine and really explain this better...but don't have the time right now. If someone is really interested in more about this, email me directly using "gamma" in the subject line, and I will get back to you...though maybe a little late.
Troup
Posted by Toni Lankerd on March 21, 2008 at 4:27 PM
Using calibration software instead of Adobe Gamma makes a difference in addition to the above. I should have said that I am now using Spyder for the last 3-4 months to calibrate my monitor.
Sorry I haven't been able to jump back into the thread due to work, some interesting discussion.
The work consisted of mentoring four young photographers 18 to 22 from around the Territory. As part of the program a local graphic designer taught them basic colour correcting in Photoshop. We did one print which looked slightly too magenta. Then we walked it into the daylight of the exhibition hall and it was spot on.
With all this digital work it is easy to overlook that in both analogue and digital colour printing you need to also colour correction for the venue lighting if having a print show.
Discussion
16 repliesCheers,
dave
Hope this helps.
Stefan.
After giving my CRT a bump it was recalibrated. While I was at it I thought I'd do the newly acquired LCD running on a dual graphics card. While they would never match close would be better.
To make the long story short, while surfing to research the calibration I came across Wincolorsetup at Microsoft. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1E33DCA0-7721-43CA-9174-7F8D429FBB9E&displaylang=en
While doing a bit of research on calibration I came across a reference in Galbraith in which the user showed how to configure Windows in AdobeRGB by altering the settings in spool\color.
While software programs will reflect the use of AdobeRGB as I hadn't heard of anybody profiling the actual monitor in the same I wanted to see if anybody else had attempted this before altering anything.
Dave
I'm assuming you mean that you can configure Windows so that it interprets colors as though they are Adobe RGB, rather than the "default" of sRGB (or something close to it). Theoretically, a calibrated monitor is displaying as close to the standard as it can. I think this would be true during calibration whether the monitor/graphics card/OS is using sRGB interpretation, or Adobe RGB. I do wonder if a graphics card/OS can accomodate this interpretation and still calibrate OK. I don't think I understand the underlying mechanics of calibration well enough to really help, but I can try (or at least ask a lot more questions about what I don't understand
At a basic level, when the calibration software displays a color patch, it adjusts how the monitor displays so that the patch matches whatever the standard is for that color. Doesn't it have to assume which colorspace you are starting with? For instance, an RGB number set, like 15,83,157, is a different color in sRGB than it is in AdobeRGB. It seems like the calibration software would have to know which you are using, in order to know what color it is trying to standardize. If you make that RGB number set look the same regardless of the underlying interpretation, I wonder if the software will have a problem matching it.
I'm thinking of two possible problems other than that :
1) I'm wondering what happens in applications. Do you have a double profile problem in PS? Assume you have an Adobe RGB PSD. I know that PS interprets the color info in the file as Adobe RGB, and converts it so that it displays properly.
I'm not sure exactly how that works though - is there an assumption of sRGB in there somewhere? Does it convert to sRGB, assuming that's what Windows is using, and you no longer are - which means your colors are inaccurate? Do you just turn off color management in PS when using AdobeRGB files?
2) The other potential problem is that AdobeRGB probably contains colors that your monitor isn't capable of showing. While this means that photos can already contain colors your monitor can't show, at least previously, they were translated such that your monitor could display them. I wonder how the monitor will clip colors now if you are using AdobeRGB as the base for Windows? Maybe this isn't a problem, and no different than the clipping that occurs now when displaying large color spaces on a monitor.
Actually, your profiling software should automatically assign the profile it creates as the default monitor profile. ARGB is a color space, not a profile.
Not "quite" similar. See this comparison of sRGB and ARGB color spaces to view the differences.
Your color management seems a bit unorthodox, but if your prints closely match what you see on your screen, then who's to argue?
There are serious issues involved in calibration and there are differences between PC monitors and Apple monitors. Many images dealt with on a Mac will look darker on a PC when using certain browsers. And you print an image and someone else prints it and they look different. It is a nightmare. If you are doing your own printing and it looks like your screen, then you can't ask for much more. The getcha is that it may look super on your screen and very different on someone elses screen. You just can't solve this for everyone. The best you can do is calibrate your systems to known standards and know when to use each format. That is as close as it can get.
Troup
As far as sRGB vs AdobeRGB, there is definitely a fairly significant difference, as has been shown. However, for most people, they probably wouldn't care or notice. As Troup said, when you get picky and really get into printing and caring about gamut, it can make a difference, but only if your image has colors that fall outside the gamut of sRGB.
Susie - Sounds like you might be making things more awkward than they need to be. Here's a couple of issues :
1) If your camera is capable of capturing in Adobe RGB, and you're using sRGB (which JPGs always are), then you aren't capturing all the very saturated colors that your camera is capable of. If you're shooting RAW or TIFF, you probably have the option to use a different color space. (Well with RAW, you can pick whatever you want in the converter I think.)
2) If you are ignoring the sRGB profile and editing in AdobeRGB, you're probably introducing color shifts because you're now taking sRGB color numbers and reading them as AdobeRGB. Perhaps then you're needing to do more color editing than you otherwise would? What really should happen is that you should open the image with sRGB and convert it AdobeRGB. This will translate the color data to try to match sRGB, but with AdobeRGB numbers.
Anyway, after all that, does anyone have an explanation for how Windows color space, your monitor profile, and PS color spaces all work together?
Calibrating my monitor has made a difference in the way the monitor displays the images and the way the prints now look coming back from the lab...they now match!
That DPReview thread I posted before is pretty enlightening on the "Windows in native AdobeRGB" issue. I've also gotten some clarification from some guys on NSN. If calibration works properly (if it doesn't assume sRGB and actually is aware of the OS color space) then PS should be fine with it's normal color management. It will convert the image working space based on the monitor profile (which should be based on the OS color space).
I don't know about other apps, especially browsers, which aren't color managed. All the color info is now going to be translated as though it's AdobeRGB, when it was probably created with something like sRGB. The most obvious place I think this would show up would be in web images, that are usually either assumed to be sRGB, or are actually tagged with sRGB. Sometimes on forums you'll see someone who complains about washed out images because they posted an AdobeRGB image and are viewing it in sRGB. If Windows color space was changed to AdobeRGB you'd have the reverse - sRGB web images viewed in AdobeRGB, which would probably have a similar negative effect.
http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/gg93/yikes_011/Untitled-1copy.jpg
I'm assuming from your link that you are using Adobe Gamma to visually calibrate your monitor? At the end of that process it saves your profile to the name you specify, then loads it each time you start Windows. When you say "chose for my monitor profile", what step are you talking about? Did you save your monitor profile to the name "AdobeRGB 1998"? Or did you type that as the name to start with?
If, in Adobe Gamma, you saved your monitor profile as "AdobeRGB 1998" you probably overwrote your Adobe RGB color space file with your monitor profile. If you just typed that name at the begining, and saved it to another file (like "Adobe Monitor Profile" maybe?) then you're probably fine, and you are actually loading that profile when Windows starts. If you happened to give it the same name as the real Adobe RGB color space, it may be possible that PS is pulling that file rather than the real Adobe RGB color space. That might depend on the file name extension though (.icm vs .icc) but I can't see what yours are.
It's better practice to run through Adobe Gamma and at the end give it a descriptive name, like "my monitor profile 031908" or something. That way you don't interfere with any other installed files.
Also keep in mind that the color shifts we're talking about are really pretty small to a lot of people - different levels of saturation, some really bright color clipping, slight changes in contrast. I don't think anyone I know who isn't into photography or graphics design would really notice them without me pointing them out.
Your comment "Troup - I don't think the difference is between PC and Apple monitors - rather it's likely either a gamma difference between the operating systems (Mac defaults to 1.8, Windows to 2.2)" is right on.
I was afraid to get to deep in to it. I recently ran across an article that states that even Apple is recommending changing the Mac gamma to 2.2 even though they still ship OS-X with 1.8 as the default.
And in regards to Safari, the article actually showed the differences between colors where a certain number color was not the same color. The fix was to change the Mac to 2.2 gamma. So, this was Safari and gamma issue. I could get the magazine and really explain this better...but don't have the time right now. If someone is really interested in more about this, email me directly using "gamma" in the subject line, and I will get back to you...though maybe a little late.
Troup
The work consisted of mentoring four young photographers 18 to 22 from around the Territory. As part of the program a local graphic designer taught them basic colour correcting in Photoshop. We did one print which looked slightly too magenta. Then we walked it into the daylight of the exhibition hall and it was spot on.
With all this digital work it is easy to overlook that in both analogue and digital colour printing you need to also colour correction for the venue lighting if having a print show.
The youngsters work for those who might be interested; all self taught before this photo camp.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arctic-winter-games-2008/sets/