V1.02
Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D300
Page 676
logical candidates,
sRGB
and
AdobeRGB
.
sRGB
is a narrow gamut Color Space (the inner, colored area
in the CIE wireframe chart, shown above) best suited for
computer monitors and many commercial lab printers, while
AdobeRGB
(the outer, gray-shaded area) is a wider gamut
Color Space that is generally better for printing on high-
fidelity equipment. As you can see, both Color Spaces are
nearly equal in the blue corner, but sRGB extends less into
the red (upper right) and quite a bit less into the possible
green range (upper left).
Tip:
If you’ve got a Macintosh and want to compare gamuts,
start the
ColorSync Utility
application, click the
Profiles
icon, choose a Color Space, click the little triangle in the
upper left corner of the plot area and then select
Hold for
Comparison
from the pop-up menu that appears. Then
select another Color Space. You’ll get a dual-plot similar to
what I’ve shown above.
sRGB
tends to produce intense, saturated colors at the
expense of subtle tonality. Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard
originally co-developed the sRGB Color Space for computer
monitors. Their choice was to use the lowest-common
denominator approach: what was the largest Color Space that
every
monitor can reproduce? The result was a narrow range
that tends to exaggerate saturation, which also adds a
perceptual increase in contrast to most images.
