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How to keep colour consistent from camera to screen to printer
COLOUR management is used to make sure the colour print or digital image you share represents the colour image you see on your computer screen. It also ensures that your computer screen is representing colours accurately, too!
There are two colour models that photographers will have to work with: RGB and CMYK. Within the RGB model are various RGB colour spaces, each of which contains a different range of colours. CMYK is designed for printing, and it’s the conversion of an RGB image to a CMYK one that has the potential to disappoint, with prints lacking the punch of the on-screen image. But starting to take colour management seriously can deliver results that are pretty close…
ONCE you start to get serious about photography, colour management becomes an area you should pay attention to.
It’s a part of the photographic process that many of us put off, and it’s easy to see why: it’s complicated and confusing, and there are several stages in the photography chain where it can go wrong. But it’s vital to manage colours throughout your workflow. Not only does it mean you get accurate colours in your digital images, it goes some way to ensuring consistency – from the image you capture in the camera to the final print.
The first thing to get your head around is the idea of a ‘colour space’. This describes the range or ‘gamut’ of colours that a device can record, display or output. Not all colour spaces are equal. For instance, the Lab colour space has a much wider gamut than the Adobe RGB space, which in turn has a wider gamut than the sRGB space.
There are four colour spaces that you’ll need to think about when it comes to colour managing your workflow: the colour space you set on the camera, the working colour space (set in your image editor or raw conversion software), the monitor’s colour space and the output colour space (for a printer or the internet).
When it comes to setting the colour space on the camera, there are two options: sRGB and Adobe RGB. The default setting is sRGB. As this is the common colour space for computer monitors, it makes a good choice if you only plan to share your images online. However, it offers a narrower range of colours than Adobe RGB, which is more suited to editing and printing. Either way, the only time you need to worry about setting the colour space on your camera is when you’re saving your pictures as JPEGs; shoot raw and you can decide on the colour space when you process your raw files later.
Before you begin processing and editing your pictures, you need to make sure your computer monitor is displaying colours as
There are four colour spaces that you’ll need to think about
intended, as this will determine the accuracy of any adjustments you make to the image. The computer display is often the weak link in the colour management chain: your monitor may be calibrated correctly, but other people’s screens may not be, and that can affect their perception of your pictures when you share them online.
Once you’re confident that your monitor is displaying colours as accurately as possible, then you can look at the working space. This is what determines how an image
The only time you need to worry about setting the colour space in the camera is when you’re saving images as JPEGs
looks in editing software like Photoshop. You can make changes in the Color Settings menu, and you can also activate a Gamut Warning overlay, which highlights colours that are out of the colour space’s range and enables you to reduce the saturation or brightness in these areas.
Finally, there’s the output colour space to consider. For images shared online, sRGB remains the best choice – but prints bring a new set of colour management configurations that we explore on the right…