Blog Archives
SNIPPETS — #2: Plain old RGB or Adobe RGB?
Many decades ago I did copyediting, writing, and proofing for the Texas A&M University Press, the Department of Chemistry, and the College of Science. I became well aware of colors and color models.
In my Canon 550D and my various photo editing programs (Photoshop CS6 Beta, Lightroom 4, PaintShop Pro X4, Photo-Paint X6, and Draw X6), I have the choice of many different types of color models, the most prevalent being RGB, Adobe RGB, and CMYK.
RGB stands for “Red Green Blue” and CMYK stands for “Cyan Magenta Yellow Black.” My camera has a default setting of RGB, but my Oki C5500 color laser printer is a CMYK printer. If I want colors from the camera to match the printer, I need to take the photos from the camera to something like Photoshop and convert to a CYMK color model. Of course, it also helps if my monitor is calibrated to CMYK.
I’ve done all that, but recently I was reading about the Adobe RGB color model because I downloaded the Beta version of Adobe Photoshop CS6. Specifically Adobe RGB apparently provides better color saturation at the outset, so yesterday when I went to the San Diego Zoo, I set my Canon 550D to Adobe RGB instead of RGB.
If you look at yesterday evening’s post (The San Diego Zoo’s albino burmese python), it should be pretty obvious which picture was taken yesterday using Adobe RGB. The other pictures are from my vast collection and used RGB. Now I have to decide if I like the extra saturation.
Here is another Adobe RGB picture from yesterday:
The hippopotamus on the left is two years old, born on January 26, 2010, at the Zoo. I remember the date because it also happens to be my wise old grandmother’s birthday. The hippopotamus at the right is the mother. The hippo exhibit has an underwater viewing area, too, where you could see that the young hippo was standing on mommy’s back.
I got the best pictures yesterday because they were playing above the water. I also think that Adobe RGB gave me better color saturation in that picture, resulting in less work in Photoshop CS6.
Do you have a preference between RGB and Adobe RGB? Did you even know there was a choice?
SNIPPETS are short posts about anything and everything.
Each SNIPPETS will also have a picture.
After all, this is Russel Ray Photos.
This post approved by
