Lightroom Color Space?

[iamjediknight]

By default Lightroom uses the ProPhoto Lab color space, so when you edit a photo in photoshop its also set to ProPhoto Lab. My concern is that if I am editing using this colorspace then its not a true representation of what will be printed.

Do you change the default color space to SRGB or Adobe RGB or leave it alone and not worry about it? Do any of the professional labs support ProPhoto Lab?

thanks, scott.

[KdLaneJr]

The color space you print from is irrelevant if your print equipment can print from it. Your lab should tell you what colorspace they want. Some only accept sRGB, some also accept Adobe RGB. I thing WHCC will accept images with the prophoto colorspace embedded in the file as I seem to recall sending them files in prophoto when I set up my account with them.

If you look at the gamut of the various colorspaces, sRGB is the most limiting, Adobe RGB adds more colordepth and Prophoto adds enough that most standard monitors are incapable of showing it fully.

Your Canon camera can be set to capture images in either sRGB or Adobe RGB. I keep mine set to adobe rgb so I don't immediately truncate colors when shooting jpegs. When shooting raw, this is immaterial and you set your colorspace in ACR.

As long as you use a calibrated monitor and output your files in the colorspace you want to print them in, you shouldn't have a problem.

[Tim Lookingbill]

This explanation:

Understanding ProPhoto RGB

should give you an idea why you want to stay in ProPhotoRGB (don't know where you're seeing Pro Photo Lab, googling doesn't bring up anything but then I don't have Lightroom, just ACR).

I wouldn't concern yourself with color spaces in Lightroom since it saves edits in the form of XMP data and doesn't touch the original pixels even for jpegs unless you resave/export out of Lightroom under a new name.

Whatever you send to an outside printer will have its pixels baked in according to your edits and at that point you can convert to whatever color space the printer asks for. The original should never be touched for all tiffs, jpegs and Raw, just have xmp metadata edits attached.

Working space is what it means and doesn't necessarily mean the final output space which should be decided by the printer if that's the final output space.

[alandg46]

If you are printing yourself, on a better printer, you will see more saturated cyans, yellows and magentas in Prophoto than in Adobe rgb, on the prints or on a lab that accepts prophoto. In Photoshop prophoto color space can be set in color settings. This is not important or even visible for viewing on a monitor as the expanded gamut will be discarded. The same is also true of editing in 16 bit rather than 8 bit. If you are shooting in RAW there is no color space assigned until you run it through a converter.