Digital Camera Colour Management - Which Colour Space?

An area of colour management which seems to cause particular confusion (is there only one?) relate to camera setup. Mainly the questions of, what is the colour gamut of RAW and what colour space should my camera be set to?

The net is awash with information most of which is mind blowing so I am copying here a couple of paragraphs from a website which goes by the name of TheLightroomLab.com. These words made sense to me and as I could not put it better myself I repost them here with due recognition of the origin.

Digital camera raw files do not have a fixed color space because these file’s do not yet contain pixels. Raw files are a record of the unprocessed “sensel” data which exceeds all gamut limits. Flexibility of color, and of color space, is one of the greatest advantages to digital camera raw files. Serious photographers often shoot in raw so that they can pick the appropriate color space for each processed copy of their original capture using post-processing software. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom makes this process completely painless since color space is one of the parameters that we can control, and automate, inside of the Export dialog.

My advice is to keep life simple. I suggest that photographer’s of any level shoot Jpeg images using the sRGB color space. Using sRGB in camera will give you files that can be printed directly off the memory card. If you need more control over color, if a wider gamut will help with your work, then bring home Raw files and learn to use post-processing software like Lightroom or Photoshop 

To summarise: I have my camera, a Sony RX100 II, set to shoot jpeg and RAW and the colour space is set to sRGB. Yes a compact, I have given up lugging DSLR's around!

Link to full article here.

Shutterchance Workspace Problem

Processing images for upload to Shuterchance.

I noticed recently that some of my images were being degraded when uploaded to Shutterchance. This was mainly evident in well saturated colour images. See example here. After some experimentation and an exchange in the Shutterchance Forum I came to the conclusion that the problem was due to my images having an AdobeRGB profile whereas Shutterchance webpages appear to require images with an sRGB profile. Images which are not in sRGB are automatically converted on upload. As sRGB contains less colour information than Adobe RGB profiles there is a loss of colour information, ie some de-saturation!

This is my workaround:-

1. Open your image in Photoshop (CS2: v9) and if the Workspace is not sRGB change it before you start any further processing.
2. I would start by copying the image.
3. To change to sRGB, go to Edit, Assign Profile, and choose sRGB, click OK.
4. You can check the Workspace ID on the bottom margin of your image.
5. The information displayed in the margin by default is the size of the image in pixels, this can be changed by clicking the black arrowhead in the margin, choose “Show” and you will get a list of options one of which will be “Document Profile”, this displays the Workspace identity.
6. I set other image parameters as:-
   Dimensions 72 px/inch, smallest side dimension 700px or largest side maximum 1000px
   JPEG compression 12

I am no Workspace expert so if I you disagree with my comments I would be pleased if you would correct them.