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Choosing the Color Gamut for Your Images
A gamut is defined as the span of colors that a device such as a printer or monitor can create. Color gamut, color depth, color palet, device gamut, or simply gamut all mean the same thing. The gamut basically represents the range of colors a printer can print or the scope of colors a monitor can display.
There are many color gamuts on the market today, like Adobe RGB, sRGB, LAB, Pro-Photo RGB etc. Pro-Photo and LAB are among of the best color gamuts available and have vast color ranges. Pro-Photo supports 281 trillion colors making it a good choice for images.
Many inkjet and laser printers do not support this kind of color scope. Most color printers are based on sRGB. Thus, most of the pictures out there are in sRGB.
There are some downsides with using sRGB. It has a limited color depth though it is still larger than CMYK. The problem with sRGB is that it does not represent the entire scope of visible spectrum, which means that the colors of your image and print output may vary from the original scene colors.
This limited color spectrum results in your getting saturated colors more often than not. Also during editing, there is the real possibility that you may lose color shades that are very close.
There are several reasons why the color range must be very large. The first is that it is simply more appealing. In addition, a printer that supports more colors than the regular sRGB based printers will print a much better image.
Adobe RGB has a much larger span than sRGB. It has the same number of colors, because the image uses 8-bits per hue but these colors are spread over a much larger span, so bright fringes, which are vibrant in RGB Adobe format, are reproduced better than by sRGB. Thus, Pro Adobe dwarfs RGB. Pro-Photo is a 16-bit RGB space, thus it has trillions of colors.
Can a printer actually print all of these? No, and neither can the human eye but the point is that PRO-Photo will be able to represent more colors than sRGB, therefore even if you convert to sRGB in the end you're more likely to have a more accurate conversion with less loss of color depth.
Photographers often have less time to spend on minor details, thus speed is always in demand. If you want to learn more about gamut and how it works, your best bet is to research the market. Remember, if you want to learn what to buy for your photographic career, reading all the information and staying informed is a must. Many photographers have posted sites that provide information and many only offer photo galleries. Still many content-based informative sites do exist.
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