[Garbz (Chris)]

Originally Posted by naskies

sRGB should be obsolete because our consumer monitors, printers, and cameras can easily exceed its narrow gamut.

Sadly monitors have the capabilities to be wide gamut but the overwhelming majority aren't. Simple reason is that crap colour management in operating systems means that monitors with wide gamuts look wrong and don't sell very well. I love wide gamut monitors, but some people just can't use them.

Originally Posted by naskies

Adobe ... becoming obsolete because consumer equipment is starting to exceed its gamut. For example, monitors that advertise "97% of Adobe RGB" gamut usually also substantially exceed Adobe RGB in some parts of the spectrum.

The only displays which I know of which can display colour significantly outside of AdobeRGB are OLED displays, one single NEC SpectraView display which has been discontinued, and one HP DreamColor model which cost over $5k. My experience is with standard wide gamut display that the primaries graze the edges of AdobeRGB, on the red and blue points, and often fall within the green point. Your interpretation of "well outside" is in my opinion an insignificant improvement. Be delighted to be proven wrong though.

Mind you this is all academic. If you're going to go to the hassle of playing with other colour gamuts then you'd be mad not to go straight for the best one, so in that regard you're quite right .

Originally Posted by naskies

ProPhoto RGB has a very wide gamut and is also widely used, though interestingly it still can't represent all of the visible colour spectrum. It's used by Adobe CS products internally, so for example in Lightroom if you open a RAW DSLR image (with edits applied) for editing in Photoshop, you'll notice that the default colour space is ProPhoto RGB.

Interestingly some of ProPhotoRGB's colours aren't real. That's how they cover so much of the visible spectrum using only 3 primary points. The blue value of (0,255,0) results in a division by zero if you use the standard textbook methods of converting colour spaces.

Also another note, ProPhotoRGB is not used in Adobe Products internally. They will either all use the working profile of the photo (like Photoshop), or in case of Lightroom there's a profile loosely based on ProPhoto but with a linear gamma curve called MelissaRGB. ProPhotoRGB just happens to be the out of the box default working profile that is applied to images when they leave Lightroom.

Originally Posted by naskies

For my own images, I edit in ProPhoto RGB for the whole workflow but convert to JPEG format with sRGB colour space for long term storage. My lifetime collection is already at 94 GB - of only "published" keepers, with no storage of RAWs or multiple sequence shots. It's definitely not ideal, but a smaller set of data is easier to "guarantee" longevity. (I keep my raw data on external drives, but I won't lose sleep if they die.)

Same workflow as mine. Good to see someone of sense rather than those who apply the theory of HDDs are cheap so we keep every crap photo out of the camera.