I knew I was going to be opening a can of worms making this video Your thoughts do have some validity, in order to utilize a wider gamut you need to have special gear. This gear is very expensive. First do you agree that you need to be able to see the color when editing your images? Do you agree that when you are editing your images in Lightroom, Photoshop, Camera Raw, CaptureOne, Eos Utility, Capture NX ect.. that you can see exactly the adjustments being made? When you are make color adjustments such as Hue or Saturation adjustments, exposure adjustments because it affects color saturation in a major way that you be able to see the exact placement of color? If you said Yes to, “you need to see exactly what is going on”, then you said yes to buying all of the gear needed to use those wider gamut color spaces. But there is more.

If you work in the ProPhoto colour space you have no way of seeing what the colours that you actually have available, and likely no way or reproducing them. They’re not going to disappear altogether, but they will be compressed into your printer’s output profile space using the rendering intent that you specify. So lets look at Monitors first, There is no Monitor that will allow you to view the Prophoto RBG color space, ProPhoto RGB’s chromaticities for RGB fall outside of CIE 1931 color, the space which represents human vision, so don’t bother trying to find one. The next monitor you can look for is one that can display Adobe RGB a wide gamut monitor. In the past they cost $6000-$7000 but the price has come way down in recent years. The industry is pushing wider gamut a manufacturing so instead of Eizo and NEC which are generally regarded as the finest monitors available and are the benchmark by which others are judged, you can find offerings from Asus, LG, LaCie, Dell, Samsunng and the list keeps growing. For an NEC or oe Eizo look to spend $2,500 and the others $1,200 to $1,600. I am sure you can find one for less but you get what you pay for.

So you buy a wide gamut monitor, now what? I am going to go out on a limb here, (one that is surely going to be chopped off) you plan to use the new monitor for other things such as photo editing right? Well you might not like the experience. For photographic editing, wide gamut is a good thing it means your screen can display more of the original captured colours accurately, in particular images with saturated colors. But most of the software has been designed with traditional monitors, wide gamut screens are fairly new to the consumer. The operating system, Windows or OSX will behave as if a standard gamut screen is attached. Here is an example of the problem you will have, the icons on your desktop, and throughout the OS, are very basic graphic files, designed years ago have only basic colour numbers in them. The OS doesn’t color manage those numbers and sends them directly to the screen as they are. Lets say you have Firefox installed, the red fox in the icon contains very strong reds. Those reds are defined as Red 255 and when sent to any monitor, Red 255 means display your strongest red. On a standard gamut monitor, the strongest red is quite strong. On a modern wide gamut monitor, this red will be much stronger again and will appear very oversaturated. Imagine all of your icons looking like this, blazing into your brain as you work. The reason I say this is because I have been there and done that . I am sure they are developing new software to automatically switch between color spaces and can recognize if you are editing photos or running standard desktop applications, but this was not the case when I used a wide gamut display in the past.

Lets move on to printing if you are doing your own large fine art prints, and consider yourself a color expert, by all means you want a color space that can represent every single color available to you from sensor capture to final print. If you have a photo with colors that fall outside the sRGB range that are important to render accurately, and you have an inkjet printer that can render them $$$$$, Adobe 98 is a better choice than sRGB (and ProPhoto is even better). Adobe 98 is also better if you have a commercial client, such as a magazine, that requests Adobe 98 color space. Most consumers judge prints by pleasing skin tones, shadow detail, and the vibrancy, as opposed to the absolute accuracy of a particular color like green or blue.
That’s why the vast majority of us look at stunning photos on the Internet and say, “Wow!” Very few people aside from high-end color experts notice that photos displayed in web browsers are limited by how many colors they can display.

Since a captures images in RAW. Many high-end cameras give the choice of converting, in-camera, to Adobe RGB or sRGB before saving on a memory card. Sometimes it’s written that the best workflow is to save your photos in Adobe RGB because it preserves the most colors, and convert to sRGB for the Internet.
The problem with that is you get the disadvantages of both color spaces with the advantages of neither. If sRGB covers the colors of your shots as it does for weddings, portraits, and most event photography and your shots will end up on the web and go to commercial printers who use sRGB anyway, I recommend sRGB and not have the files pass through Adobe RGB in the first place. The printers in most commercial labs, such as WHCC, Bay Photo, Mpix, EZ Prints, Shutterfly, Kodak, Fujifilm, Photobox, Costco, Snapfish, Wolfe’s, etc., shine light on photographic paper, Just like when I used to live in the Darkroom. They all use a similar color range to the sRGB color space. Most of them expect your file to be in sRGB and if it isn’t, your prints will look washed out.

The last thing a self-respecting color expert wants is to give up colors. They want monitors and printers that hit every color perfectly, and ICC profiles attached to each image. You have to admit the power of the Internet is simplicity. The Internet works on TV, consumer devices like cell phones and those devices don’t know anything about ICC profiles and neither do websites like Facebook or CNN. But they do know sRGB, and I would think that 99.9% of us think photos look gorgeous on the Internet and every file is in sRGB including the files on your website.

So an hour and half into this comment, I want to say thanks for the nice question, I think by looking at your website you do some amazing work, if you are going to be creating fine art prints, and you have the money for the gear to properly view the files (not just soft proof with gamut warning), and you have the money for a wide gamut printer or use a lab that has one and shares ICC profiles with you, then you should be using the sRGB color space. Lastly, I think you should register at the blog so I don’t have to approve your comments. I look forward to hearing from you in the future.

the better inkjet printers and inks are capable of reproducing saturated cyans, magentas and yellows that are outside of the Adobe RGB colour space, making ProPhoto a much better choice