Last month if you remember we discussed how printing your images was the “ultimate backup”  But what good is a great backup to your best images if they don’t look their best?  This month we are going to explore a little known part of your photography called color space. Most professionals know about it, take the time to perfect it and produce stellar images of their work as a result.

So what is color space? Well by definition it is it is an abstract mathematical model describing the Gamut or way colors can be represented as tuples of numbers. What the heck is a tuple you ask? Great Question! A tuple is a mathematical object that consists of certain object (which are also mathematical), in our case the values of RGB or CMYK, a grouping of 3 or 4 objects working together to create a product.

Ok so we have gone a little deep here with the definition but suffice it to say, the color space you work in will directly affect your final product, namely your print. There are lots of color spaces out there but only a few that we are truly concerned with in photography today.

Remember when you used to walk into a store that sold TV’s and every single set looked different? The colors - were all different. Well that has changed today. As a standard, television, computer monitor, camera, printer color space was adopted. This “ standardized color space” produced a very “ homogeneous world” color wise and we no longer see a rainbow of colors when we look at a long display of LCD TV’s at our local bargain store. This is nice for buying a TV or a computer monitor based on its other merits like HD quality etc but it doesn’t really make for really great prints.

What? The standard color space (sRGB) isn’t good enough for your best prints? Nope it isn’t.  This largely generic, additive color mixing method of display, just doesn’t meet the professional standard of quality for printing your pictures. The Gamut or amount of available colors just aren't adequate. What’s worse is most pros don’t even know this and blindly print their work with the local X-Mart and get something even less than sRGB in return for their troubles. Yes that’s right, chemical based labs at your local X-mart use a paper called RA-4 which has an even smaller color Gamut model than sRGB for reproducing the images you shoot. So what’s the answer?

Haven’t you ever wondered why a professional print looks better than one done at a big box retailer? Well color space is part of your answer. The rest can be attributed to the skill and abilities of the photographer to properly post process the images to their peak quality.

Step 1, if you are looking for a higher quality image, you need to change both your input and your output. Let’s start with your camera. Most Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras have a menu driven option to allow you to change the color space you are shooting in. Look through your manual for color space settings to see if your camera qualifies. If it does and you want to expand your world vision with relation to color, bump it up to Adobe RGB from sRGB. Keep in mind though that this is really only step one. If you use a manipulation program like Photoshop, Lightroom or another to adjust your images post production, you will want to make sure that you are viewing your images in the proper colorspace there too. You can actually assign a color space to any image in these programs that will insure that the output is in the correct color

Step 2 is all about your final print. About 10 years ago the term Giclee’ was used to describe inkjet prints. In the years since these printers have been embraced by the photo industry and consumers alike to print their photos, in recent years they have only gotten better. If you are printing your adobe color space images at your local X-mart, remember that most photo finishers big box style, work in a sRGB or smaller color Gamut. When they print your work, work that you shot in Adobe RGB, it will be “interpolated” down to their color space. You will lose colors, colors will shift and the overall saturation of those images will suffer. So if you want to output your images in the proper color space, be sure to go to a Pro Lab for your best print work, be careful though not all pro labs are made the same. Some use those very same machines that are available at your X-mart and will pawn off a substandard color space as “PRO” when it really isn’t. The model above compares the colors that can be reproduced using a moderately priced Giclee printer (RED WIRE FRAME) versus using your local X-mart or big box retail printer (SOLID CENTER PIECE). When the print really matters use a pro printing service.

You can expect to pay a little more for your prints at a proper Pro Lab, but the differences can be amazing! As we said at the beginning of this article, the pros know the difference and that is why the images you get from them are so much richer and more vibrant in color than the ones available from the big box photo centers.