I might be opening a huge can of worms here and I am sure this will generate quite a bit of user comments but with Lightroom I think this is very applicable. In a previous post I talked about what the default color space is in Lightroom - basically a ProPhoto RGB color space with an sRGB tone curve, nicknamed Melissa RGB by the folks at Adobe. With this in mind I feel that Lightroom is best used along with a ProPhoto RGB workflow. I’ll explain why here shortly.

First, why would anyone want to use a ProPhoto RGB workflow? Well, if you are shooting in the Adobe 1998 color space in your camera then understand that most DSLRs capture colors that are beyond the Adobe 1998 color space. Hence, to work with all of these colors one would need to have a larger color space than Adobe 1998 - hence, that is ProPhoto RGB.

Second, as digital devices get better and monitors and printers continue to improve we might soon someday have devices that can reproduce ProPhoto RGB colors. At the moment, some printers can produce an astounding array of colors - almost all if not a bit more than the Adobe RGB color space.

Now, getting back to Lightroom, since it is defaulted to a ProPhoto RGB color space one could say that it is optimized for that color space as well. If you are a portrait photographer cranking out prints for your clients it might be a waste of time to deal with a ProPhoto RGB color space, but if you process your jpegs or raw images in Lightroom and then export those images - when you open them up in Photoshop you might notice a slight color shift. For most images the color shift isn’t significant but occasionally it can be noticeable. It is certainly noticeable if you compare the ProPhoto RGB histogram in Lightroom to the sRGB histogram in Photoshop.

So what’s the point? If you are going to be exporting into the sRGB color space from Lightroom leave some room on either side of the histogram to account for the clipping on either end that will occur. If you want to dial your images in so that they look exactly as you want and the colors won’t shift then always export to the ProPhoto RGB color space and “convert to profile” in Photoshop where you have some control of how the conversion process works.

In the future it would be nice to see some control over the color space while working in Lightroom. Maybe in the preferences a color space could be chosen just like in Adobe Camera Raw. This would then adjust the histogram for whichever color space is chosen so images could be dialed in perfectly with no color shift on export. I understand Adobe’s reasoning for why they didn’t do this - to keep the user interface simple but as Lightroom grows more complex perhaps that will need some re-thinking. Either way, if you use a ProPhoto RGB workflow this is a non-issue.

All of my exported digital images are stored as ProPhoto RGB tiff images (in 16-bit or 8-bit) and when I need to send images out to clients they are converted to either Adobe RGB or Colormatch RGB for print work and sRGB for web usage. For printing, on an Epson, I generally leave the images in ProPhoto RGB or convert them to Adobe RGB.

In the end, I can always convert to a smaller color space. If I had exported the images into sRGB I can convert the image to Adobe RGB but I cannot create colors that weren’t there so I won’t end up with a true Adobe RGB image. Starting with the biggest color space gives me the most options down the road.

Please note this is for the type of work I do. If you have an sRGB workflow I am not bashing that. If I were a wedding photographer I’d shoot raw images and export to the sRGB color space because that will give my lab prints the most accurate colors. It’s apples for apples and oranges for oranges, but if you are on the fence I’d say go with the larger color space.

By the way, regarding last weeks blog post on SlideShowpro I have a much nicer gallery that is online at:

http://www.jessicakilroymusic.com/photos.html

This one incorporates music and is embedded in an HTML page. Check it out if you are curious.

That’s it for this session. See you next week….

Adios, Michael Clark