V1.02
Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D300
Page 675
best possible results from your camera, you need to know a
few things about color profiles and Color Spaces.
The D300 allows the user to choose between two Color
Spaces:
sRGB
and
AdobeRGB
. Color Modes, which
interacted with Color Spaces, are now a thing of the past and
don’t appear in the D300 menus (though you can still get the
effects they produced by downloading the D2X Picture
Controls).
Color Spaces (also sometimes called gamuts) define the range
of colors that are available to be reproduced. Imagine a world
where there are only five shades of a red versus a hundred
shades of red. Identical scenes would look different in those
two worlds, no? In a simplified way, that’s what we face with
color reproduction methods. Television screens (and
monitors) can reproduce one range of colors, an inexpensive
printer another range, and expensive multi-plate print
technologies yet a different range. The inks in printing (or the
phosphors and shadow mask in monitors) can limit (or
increase) the color range.
In a perfect world, the color range of your capture device (e.g.
your D300) would match that of your editing device (e.g. your
monitor), which in turn would match that of your printer. In
that perfect world, colors captured by the camera would be
maintained perfectly, right through to the final printed image.
A Color Space defines how narrow or wide the color range is
and what a particular RGB value should represent. The D300
allows you to “set” the Color Space. Nikon has chosen two
