The importance of using the right color space

Don’t listen to them!!  I saw a speaker at the recent PPAMass convention who told the audience of photographers that if their lab uses SRGB color space, “fire your lab!”  This comes from a man who outputs his own work on his sponsor’s inkjet printers.

What he doesn’t realize is that wedding and portrait photographers who use color lab services (virtually the whole industry) need to use the SRGB color space since the printers the lab uses operate in SRGB color space.  While the Adobe 1998 color space offers a broader range of space, the end result is that much larger corrections need to be made to “rein in” the image to print correctly.  Any extreme corrections, be it in Photoshop or in the nondestructive database corrections used at LusteColor via the Kodak DP2 printing system, cannot give an optimum result.

Bottom line is set your camera to SRBG color space to get the best prints possible for you and your customer.

For a more in-depth look at the differences between color profiles check out this article from Will Crockett.