The wider your colour gamut is, the more saturated your colours will be. When your colour gamut is reduced, so is the saturation in your colours – a phenomenon known as “clipping”. Clipping is most apparent when converting from RGB to CMYK, with many of the rich colours that were available in RGB no longer available in CMYK. This is the key difference between commercial printers, which print in CMYK, and fine-art printers, which print in RGB.
Understanding Common Colour Spaces
What is RGB colour space? RGB simply stands for Red, Green and Blue. It is the combination of these three basic colours that makes up the entire spectrum of colours visible to the eye.
sRGB is the most common RGB work space because it is the easiest to manage, and the colour space for the web. Most monitors cannot display any colours beyond that of the sRGB colour space. This is the colour space we use at Chromocat.
Adobe RGB 1998 is a wider gamut work space than sRGB. Adobe 98 has become a default photographic RGB space in recent years.
Pro Photo RGB (created by Kodak) contains all possible colours, even if they cannot be viewed on screen or in print. With the advancements made with digital photography and the RAW workflow, Pro Photo RGB has become a popular working space, but it can be difficult for colour management as screen and paper gamuts are narrower.
“All colours are the friends of their neighbours and the lovers of their opposites.”
~MARC CHAGALL
The colour space you decide to work in will effect how wide your gamut is. However, there are also other factors that will affect the gamut:
Proper colour management is highly important. Here at Chromocat Press, our studio is fully colour managed every step of the way — starting from our fine art digitisation services through to the finished print. This allows for predictable colour output first time, every time.
Another factor is your paper choice. We have many different papers to choose from, some with a wide gamut range and some with a smaller gamut range. In general, matte papers have a smaller gamut than semi-gloss or gloss papers. We suggest that you give us a call if you are unsure about which paper will best suit your image. We also provide sample packs if would like to see and feel the different types of paper we offer and to compare the colour reproduction on the different media types.
Learn a little more about colour management and paper in this article.
Original article by Nina Lipscombe (c) 2017