Le 14.6.2003 5:09, «?lea?» <lea@whinydogpress.com> a écrit?: > Can someone define the term 'color space', what it is comparable to in film > photography (if anything), why there are so many and why using the right one > is so important. Is one space better than another? Also, is the term > interchangeable for the phrase 'color profile'. I'd say that a color space is like a color gamut; in the theory of colors, you have a color wheel; when you represent colors on a digital screen, you have three colors RBV which can be located on the colorwheel; you link them with lines and they form a triangle showing you which colors the display screen is able to represent. Printers are defined by CMYK and have a relatively different triangle. Each of our tools (printer, camera, scanner or screen) has it's own triangle, each own color profile. In order to make all these tools talk together, PS have imagined so called Ideal spaces : to which each one should be able to refer in order to get the same colors. These standardized triangle which aren't referring to a special tool are called color space. The wider the color space, the best. For viewing on the web, the SRGB space is standard. For printing and for other graphic work it's usually Adobe RGB. It is said that printers will do a better job with Adobe RGB .. But it's a more difficult space for display screen and the difference between what you print and what you get is likely to be greater. Color space and color profiles are often used indistinctly. You can say tha the color profile of your scanner is the unique color space defining your scanner. All these files are .icc files whether they refer to the reference common spaces or to the individual scanner/camera/printer profiles.. > If writing it all out is too much trouble, could someone direct me to a web > site that might cover this in an elementary way? It's all so very heady to > me. http://digitaldog.net/tips.html Have a look there : it's a page of links and about half of them deal with color management. There is a general introduction and different info for different versions of PS and for different kind of printers. Look also here : This is a tutorial for printing and color management in PS : http://www.computer-darkroom.com/ps7-colour/ps7_1.htm There are also many other tutorials on this site, including older ones, for older versions of PS .. Just explore a little. -- Christiane
