If you have wondered what ‘setting the color profile of a photograph’ means, today’s Toecabulary answers just that.

A color gamut is simply the number of colours a color profile can understand. And the Adobe RGB colour profile, developed by Adobe Systems, has a particular color gamut, or, can appreciate a few million colours. It was developed to accommodate most of the colours achievable on colour printers.

Here, we have processed the same image in the two different colour profiles – Adobe RGB and sRGB. As it is evident, the range of colours in the Adobe RGB rendering is a rather wider one (more colours) than as rendered in sRGB.

However, to sum up, all web browsers do not support Adobe RGB. So it is important that you process them in sRGB to ensure they look the same on all browsers, and while processing them in sRGB, bring the colours as close to what you saw while making your photographs.

‍

Here is a small video that illustrates the different ranges of colours available in the different colour profiles. The Adobe RGB allows for more colours than the sRGB colour space. It is clear that the sRGB gamut doesn’t contain all the cyan-green hues. The Adobe RGB clearly provides more colours to utilise, as it comprises slightly more than 50% of all colours in the visible spectrum.

And it is very important that you colour-calibrate your monitor, so that it renders these colours in the true sense. This way, you don’t get incorrect colours when you process your images to later print them or to share them on the web for people to see in different browsers across the world. Colour calibration is thus a very important requirement for you to post-process your photographs.

While the sRGB colour profile is the best to render images for the web, Adobe RGB is what you need to choose if you intend to print images with real colours.

Interested in improving your skills?

Imparting photography knowledge that eventually increases our attention and love for various details of life on this planet is at the heart of everything we do at Toehold. If you are a photography enthusiast and are interested in learning photography methodically from our ace photographers, explore our Photography Workshops and other related courses at Toehold Academy, or if you want to harness your skills and get mentored by our team of extraordinary photographers on the field, in real-time on our Photography Tours to destinations across India and abroad, explore our Photography Travel offerings.