Your Reputation Depends on Your Color Space
When it comes to selling wildlife photography, understanding color space might not seem all that important. However, nothing could be further from the truth.
Color space is critically important when it comes to the end use of your photograph.
We edit in one color space. We display images online in another. And when we make submissions and sales to art buyers, we use a completely different color space to do so.
Get this part right, and your photographs will be of the highest quality and exactly what art buyers are looking for. Get this wrong, and you announce to the world that you are an amateur, with little to no experience selling your photos, and you will likely lose the sale as the art buyer moves on to other photographers they can trust to deliver as needed.
Yeah, it’s that important.
But before we can begin discussing which color space you should be doing what in, we first need to understand what color space even means in the context of digital photography and how it is impacting the way we see your photography.
Have you ever uploaded a photograph to Facebook or Instagram and found yourself frustrated with the way the colors looked?
Have you ever moved a photo from Lightroom to Photoshop or Photoshop to Lightroom and found that the colors were completely different between programs?
Have you ever printed a photograph and been disappointed with the results?
All of these are problems with color space. And you can probably start to see from these examples why getting color space wrong will have a huge impact on not only sales but your reputation as a professional wildlife photographer.
To understand what color space is, imagine an oil painter’s palette of paint. You know, the wooden thing Bob Ross used to hold when painting “happy little trees” that had globs of paint on it.
This paint palette contains all the colors that the painter is going to work with for their painting. Some pallets are larger than others and can hold more colors. Others are smaller and hold less.
This is like color space.
Color space is the range of possible colors that someone will be able to see in your photograph. Get this right, and everything looks as it’s supposed to. Get this wrong, and you end up with color banding, carrot orange when it’s supposed to be candy apple red, or just overall washed out, muted, unsaturated, flat colors even though what you saw on your screen was beautiful.
So, choosing the right color space is important every step of the way.
Although there are many different color spaces in digital photography, there are only 3 that really matter:
sRGB
Adobe RGB
ProPhoto RGB
Sure, there are some old school options like CMYK. And yes, some publications still use CMYK. However, as the photographer, sRGB, Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto RGB are the only ones you need to worry about.
ProPhoto RGB is the largest and most diverse color space available to us, followed by Adobe RGB. Meanwhile, sRGB is the smallest of color spaces to work with.
This isn’t exactly how it all works, of course. It’s far more complicated than this. But this is the best and easiest way to think about color space in terms of how it impacts your photography and ultimately your sales.
From the Camera
All of this starts with the color space you record photos in on your camera.
In general, most cameras today come set up by default for sRGB.
CHANGE THIS IMMEDIATELY!
As I mentioned above, sRGB is the smallest color space you can work with. You will likely only have two color spaces options in camera to chose from so switch this to Adobe RGB.
You should understand though that in-camera color space like this does not affect your raw files. These only impact your photographs if you are shooting in jpeg. However, when you make a photograph and look at the histogram – including the RGB histograms – this information is based off of a jpeg that the camera produces with the raw file.
The image you see on the back of the camera, as well as the corresponding histograms, all a jpeg image – even if you are photographing in raw. So, if you are basing your decisions such as white balance and exposure off of histograms that correspond to a jpeg image, it’s important to ensure that the jpeg you are basing these decisions from is capturing the largest amount of color and data possible.
This is why I also recommend only working with a flat or neutral color profile in your camera as well. Although these color profiles (different from color space) only affect your images if you are shooting in jpeg, what you see when you look at your histogram will be impacted by this even in raw.
Make sense?
Working Space
Next up is the color space you work with when editing your photographs. For this, we want to use ProPhoto RGB. Again, this is the largest color space and even contains colors that the human eye is unable to see. No one really uses this color space when it comes to printing or publishing. However, it’s best practice to make sure you are working with and editing photographs with the most data and largest colors palette possible.
Think of it this way: you can always take something away that you already have, but you can’t add something you don’t have to begin with.
For this reason, both Lightroom and Photoshop should be setup to with ProPhoto RGB as your color working space.
Thankfully, Lightroom comes setup for editing in ProPhoto RGB by default already. However, you will need to go into Preferences > External Editing and change the color space for Photoshop to ProPhoto RGB. This way, when you send a photo from Lightroom to Photoshop to do additional edits, it is exported to the program in the ProPhoto color space as opposed to sRGB or Adobe RGB.
Not everyone uses Lightroom – although I would make the argument that as a working professional it is one of the best tools we have available for organizing and managing our photos (remember, it is technically a DAM – digital asset management – program), many photographers use Photoshop and ACR to handle all of the editing.
So, to set all of this up in Photoshop, go to Edit > Color Settings. Then, under Working Spaces, select ProPhoto RGB.
Magazines and Prints
Now that we have the color spaces set up both in camera and for our working space in our editing software, we next need to understand color space in regards to the end use of a photograph. As a rule of thumb, if you are preparing a photograph for sale – whether to upload directly to a stock photography agency, send off to a magazine, or over to a printer for a fine art print to be made, you should ALWAYS export your photograph in Adobe RGB.
Always.
As I mentioned above, no one really uses ProPhoto for publishing or printing photographs – yet. But almost everyone, as in 99.9% of all customers and clients we have worked with, use Adobe RGB.
For this reason, it’s safe to assume that anytime you are going to send out a photograph for a client / customer, in whatever fashion, you should export it as Adobe RGB.
Online Use
Online use is different from printed media. When viewing images online, web browsers like Chrome and Safari use a much smaller color gamut than print media. Additionally, website and social media, like Facebook and Instagram also use the smallest color gamut they can get away with as well. And the reason for this is speed of loading time. Everyone on the internet wants everything to move at the speed of light. The smaller the files, the faster the load time. So, the smaller the color space, the smaller the file, the faster the load time.
And thus, for this reason, we should always work with sRGB color space for PERSONAL online use.
What do I mean by personal? Think: posting to social media, putting photos up on your personal website’s portfolio of work, newsletters, marketing, etc. These are all about just showing off your work to the world.
When selling photography through stock agencies, for instance, it’s likely that the bulk of your sales will be for online use. Despite this fact, you should only export those photos as Adobe RGB. Remember it’s easy for a customer to save in a smaller color space.
So, for this reason, sRGB should only be used for your own personal needs online. Want to upload photos to Facebook? Save in sRGB. Want to send out a photo in your newsletter? Again, sRGB. Is it going on your website? Also sRGB. It’s not until the photo is going someplace where someone can download the photograph for use that we want to make sure THOSE images are saved as Adobe RGB.
There is truly nothing complicated about color space in digital photography. And once you have your camera and editing software set up, you never have to think about those things again. All this really boils down to is how you are using the photograph – for sale or for personal online use. Simple as that.
Even though this is a relatively simple concept however, doesn’t mean that it’s not critically important to understand and get right. And few things say amateur to a prospective photo buyer like wonky colors that are not true to life or color banding.