# Soft proofing sRGB on wide gamut monitor



## Eetyaj

Hi everyone, 

I recently got a Dell U2413 which I can set to output in sRGB or Adobe RGB colour spaces. Please excuse me if I write in point form below, but I think this will help me lay out my understanding and people can then tell me where I'm going wrong !  

1) My basic understanding is that Adobe RGB is a bigger colour space than sRGB

2) It is beneficial to work in the widest colour space possible, so to edit RAW files in Lightroom, which uses ProPhoto RGB, I can set my monitor to output in Adobe RGB. 

3) If I view a sRGB soft proof in Lightroom, it should show more muted colours in general since sRGB is only a subset of the Adobe RGB gamut which my monitor is set to output. 

My problem is that this doesn't happen, so it must mean I've misunderstood something, either about colour management or Lightroom 5 settings. 

In my Lightroom 5.3, with my monitor set to Adobe RGB, there is almost no difference between the master file and the sRGB soft proof. 

However, if I change my monitor to output in sRGB, my ENTIRE screen changes to a more muted appearance. Of course, then the soft proof ( and everything else for that matter) shows more muted colours and is kind of what I expected when viewing the soft proof within the initial Adobe RGB monitor gamut setting. 

I suppose this means when I soft proof in sRGB, I need to switch my display to show sRGB colours. 

However, I would have thought that when I soft proof sRGB in Lightroom whilst my monitor outputs Adobe RGB, it should STILL show the effect of the more muted colours already since Lightroom should convert my image into sRGB, a subset of Adobe RGB, and show the appropriate loss of gamut and colour changes in the Lightroom soft proof. 

I apologise if this is not really a Lightroom question and I should post in a monitor forum instead, but any help would be much appreciated ! 

Thanks ! 
Justin


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## clee01l

Justin, Welcome to the forum. The first thing for you to wrap your mind around is color management and color calibration.  Your Dell is providing you with (at least) two color profiles  (AdobeRGB & sRGB)  These are not exactly the same thing as a Color space of the same name.  The color gamut of your Dell monitor is an 'envelope' of the possible colors that your monitor can produce. It won't exactly fit either the AdobeRGB or the sRGB color spaces though it may come close The firs thing that you need to do is tune your monitor so that when (for example) the graphic card sends a true "red" signal to the monitor, the monitor emits a light that registers as true red and not some other shade of red.
This is where color calibration come in. You  can use a tool to calibrate your monitor precisely or you can eyeball the calibration using an app provided by Windows.  The result is a color profile (*.icc) that will tune your monitor  Dell provides to such color profiles that might be close to the color spaces they represent.  These if used can be "good enough" to get you close. But not necessarily accurate as your monitor ages. 

Light room used ProphotoRGB as a color space so that every pixel will be adjusted to fit inside that envelope. Yes it is wider gamut than AdobeRGB which is wider than sRGB.  As you post process in LR you will determine the colors that your image will take based upon the visual transmission from the monitor, YOUR monitor.  It will look different on MY monitor even though both will be calibrated.  AdobeRGB color profile is a reflected color profile and is generally used only for files that will be printed.  sRGB is a transmissive color profile best used for images that will be displayed through the web.  The reason for this is that not everyone will see the image in the same colors and sRGB is a small enough gamut that the color values contained in the file will be represented on most monitors. 
The advice that I give here is to calibrate your monitor regularly to provide the truest colors that it can generate and process your image in LR ProphotRGB color space. When you export the image to a file you set the color profile in the exported file to match the intended audience (web or print).  It you are going to print from LR you need to match the image on the screen to the printer and paper characteristics so that what you see on paper looks like what you see on the screen.  This is what soft-proofing attempts to do  and nothing more.  There should be a print color profile (*.icc) to match your printer and paper characteristics.  It is this color profile that you will assign in Develop soft-proofing and then adjust your image accordingly.


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## Eetyaj

Hi, 

Thanks for the quick and detailed reply. I think I understand what you're saying. 

However, I still would have thought that when showing an sRGB soft proof in Lightroom, I should visibly see a difference to the master image if my monitor is displaying an Adobe RGB gamut. Similarly, when I soft proof my printer / paper combination, there is also minimal difference, although I find that my prints DO match my monitor well enough. What doesn't match is when I save an sRGB image for web, hence my initial query on sRGB soft proofing. 

Is it the case that a monitor will force an sRGB image, and stretch its colours to match an Adobe RGB space if the monitor is set that way? I had thought that a colour management aware programme will precisely NOT do that and just display the appropriate sRGB image WITHIN the gamut of the Adobe RGB monitor display. So, if I am processing my master file in Lightroom, with my monitor set at Adobe RGB, when I soft proof sRGB, I should see a visible difference in the colours of the sRGB soft proof and closer to what it would display on the web? 

Thanks again for your help, and your patience too  ! 

Justin


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## Tony Jay

Eetyaj said:


> Is it the case that a monitor will force an sRGB image, and stretch its colours to match an Adobe RGB space if the monitor is set that way?
> I had thought that a colour management aware programme will precisely NOT do that and just display the appropriate sRGB image WITHIN the gamut of the Adobe RGB monitor display. So, if I am processing my master file in Lightroom, with my monitor set at Adobe RGB, when I soft proof sRGB, I should see a visible difference in the colours of the sRGB soft proof and closer to what it would display on the web?


Hi Justin,

A monitor that approximates the AdobeRGB colourspace will NOT "force" an image and "stretch its colours to match an AdobeRGB space" when that image has an sRGB profile applied.

When you softproof, particularly for the web, and the ICC profiles are designed for digital projection (i.e. transmissive media) like sRGB you will notice relatively little change in your image as it looks on-screen in Lightroom.
If you look at the screenshot I have posted of a very handsome Eastern Grey Kangaroo in softproof mode (see below) you will note several things.

The first image has no gamut warnings applied and it looks just the same as before I asked Lightroom to softproof although the ICC profile applied is AdobeRGB.
The second image still has the same AdobeRGB ICC profile applied and with the destination gamut warning applied all the red blotches are showing colours that cannot be accommodated by the profile.
The third image has sRGB set as the destination profile and there are a lot more red blotches visible demonstrating well how much smaller the gamut is compared to AdobeRGB.
The fourth image has an ICC profile for Canson Baryta Photographique printing with an Epson Pro 7900 - interestingly enough there are almost no areas out of gamut showing the incredible gamut of colour achievable by modern printers and papers in appropriate combination. It is impossible to see on this screenshot but the image loses some tonal vibrancy and the colours also become slightly muted because I have 'simulate paper and ink' checked.
The last image is even more interesting. The blue areas represent the gamut warning for my monitor which happens to be an NEC MultiSync PA271W which is a monitor designed for high-end video, photographic, and graphics work where colour fidelity is important. Its gamut approached that of the AdobeRGB colourspace. However, from what is demonstrated here, my printer is capable of printing colours that I cannot see on the monitor. The message here is: If you can help it don't limit the gamut of an image before printing - say to AdobeRGB or sRGB, you will lose out on a lot.




I have not yet spoken of rendering intents.
The two available in Lightroom are perceptual colorimetric and relative colorimetric.
You will need to apply one or the other.
Rendering deals with how the system handles colours that are out of gamut and how all the out-of-gamut colours are changed to the gamut of the destination ICC profile.

The difference between them is relatively simple to explain but as you will see the decision governing which to apply will come down to an aesthetic and not a technical choice.

Relative colorimetric intent will take any colour that is out of gamut for the destination ICC profile and map it to the nearest colour that is in gamut.
What this means is that no colours that are within gamut are altered at all.

Perceptual colorimetric intent is different. Here the idea is to try, as much as possible, to retain the relationships between colours.
What this means is that should there be a whole spectrum of similar shades of colour that are out of gamut the rendering intent will shuffle all the colours along a bit to get them into gamut.
This way the subtle differences between similar shades are preserved although everything might loose a bit of vibrancy because in gamut colours may also end up being shifted too to accommodate what is happening.
Using relative colorimetric rendering in this situation will result in all those subtle out-of-gamut shades all being mapped to one colour.

Which to use is always an aesthetic choice, but in general, images with lots of detail and lots of subtle shades look better with perceptual rendering intent, while images with large blocky bits of vibrant colours may look better with relative rendering intent.
Trial-and-error is the best way to get familiar with how rendering intents work.

Colour management is a big topic - we are only just scratching the surface here.
Given the fact that you both print and prepare images for the web it would be a good idea to make a systematic study of colour management a large part of your learning curve.
Once you have really got this stuff it is actually rather easy to apply.

Tony Jay


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## Eetyaj

Hi Tony Jay, 

Wow, thanks very much for the detailed reply. The pictures of different out of gamut colours were very instructive. 

If you could bear with me please, and I apologise if this sounds repetitive, but I still have a niggling query. 

So, I understand now that it's NOT always the case that an sRGB soft proof will visibly look more muted and that using the out-of-gamut warnings will be a better way to display the difference in colour spaces. 

However, assume I set my monitor to Adobe RGB space. I process a RAW file in LR. I do an sRGB soft proof. Switching between the Adobe RGB and sRGB soft proofs, I see no noticeable large differences but I do get the effect above of different patches of out-of-gamut areas. My understanding though is that the sRGB soft proof (with due consideration for the out-of-gamut patches) is then close enough to how the image would display when viewed, say on the web, by someone else. 

 The problem now is when I switch my monitor mode to sRGB space. My assumption is that the sRGB soft proof should remain unchanged because previously it was an sRGB image correctly shown in Adobe RGB monitor space by colour managed software (LR). What does happen though, for me, is that the colours in the soft proof (and everything else on the whole monitor) become much more muted. 

I don't understand why this happens. Which is why I asked the initial query of whether it's the case that the Adobe RGB monitor setting stretches the sRGB image colours.

In any case, does this mean that for a more "accurate" sRGB soft proof, I need to switch my monitor to sRGB mode ? Which would be a bit tedious (just a little!) because that means I process the master in Adobe RGB space, then for files I want to put on the web, I soft proof sRGB and then switch my monitor to sRGB. 

Sorry for being long-winded but it probably displays my lack of understanding more than anything else !  

Thanks again, 
Justin


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## LouieSherwin

Hi Justin, 

Good questions. Color management is a complex subject and everyone benefits when these questions are asked. Cletus and Tony have provided some excellent answers so I hope that I may add to your understanding by addressing each question.



Eetyaj said:


> I recently got a Dell U2413 which I can set to output in sRGB or Adobe RGB colour spaces. Please excuse me if I write in point form below, but I think this will help me lay out my understanding and people can then tell me where I'm going wrong !
> 
> 1) My basic understanding is that Adobe RGB is a bigger colour space than sRGB



Yes.



Eetyaj said:


> 2) It is beneficial to work in the widest colour space possible, so to edit RAW files in Lightroom, which uses ProPhoto RGB, I can set my monitor to output in Adobe RGB.



Yes. An important distinction here is that sRGB, Adobe RGB and ProPhoto RGB are "color spaces". Specifically they are mathematical formulas that each describe a range (gamut) of possible colors. The reason you want to do editing in the largest color space is so that when you make edits the results are are arbitrarily cut off (clip) as a result of for example a curve adjustment you make on an image. ProPhoto RGB is huge, in fact is so big that it includes colors that are not visible. This means that you are very unlikely to clip when making even big adjustments.

Regarding your Dell monitor. I think that Dell marketing has done a slight disservice in the way it describes using sRGB and Adobe RGB. The truth is that every physical output device including monitors have their own gamut that is unique to that specific device.  

What Dell is  really saying is that this monitor has the ability to display a gamut that is just about the same as the Adobe RGB color space. They are not the same and never will because 1) colors of the pixels are dependent on the materials used in making the device and 2) These colors change over time as the monitor ages. This is why you have to have to make your own monitor profile and update it on a regular basis.

There is no reason I can think of why you would us anything other than the widest gamut setting that your monitor provides. If you did use any other settings then you would need to create a separate monitor profile foreach setting and remember to load that profile every time you switched to that monitor. Too much extra work for no advantage. 

In addition setting your monitor to clip it's native gamut to something smaller is, in my view, simply wasteful of a good monitor not to mention confusing. There is no telling what additional color changes the monitor is doing internally over which you have no control. It's just marketing mumbo-jumbo IMHO of course.



Eetyaj said:


> 3) If I view a sRGB soft proof in Lightroom, it should show more muted colours in general since sRGB is only a subset of the Adobe RGB gamut which my monitor is set to output.
> 
> My problem is that this doesn't happen, so it must mean I've misunderstood something, either about colour management or Lightroom 5 settings.



No, not necessarily. As Tony pointed out each image has a gamut of colors. Depending on the individual image that gamut can be included inside the sRBG gamut. I that case you will not see any difference on the soft proof. If the image gamut is bigger than sRGB then you will can see the gamut warnings as Tony described.



Eetyaj said:


> In my Lightroom 5.3, with my monitor set to Adobe RGB, there is almost no difference between the master file and the sRGB soft proof.
> 
> However, if I change my monitor to output in sRGB, my ENTIRE screen changes to a more muted appearance. Of course, then the soft proof ( and everything else for that matter) shows more muted colours and is kind of what I expected when viewing the soft proof within the initial Adobe RGB monitor gamut setting.



I do not think you are understanding how the color management system (CMS) really works. You always want your monitor to use the profile created by with a color management tool. That profile is what describes the specific characteristics of your monitor to the CMS. Assigning color spaces to devices will always give you inaccurate even bad results. 



Eetyaj said:


> I suppose this means when I soft proof in sRGB, I need to switch my display to show sRGB colours.



Again no. See above.



Eetyaj said:


> However, I would have thought that when I soft proof sRGB in Lightroom whilst my monitor outputs Adobe RGB, it should STILL show the effect of the more muted colours already since Lightroom should convert my image into sRGB, a subset of Adobe RGB, and show the appropriate loss of gamut and colour changes in the Lightroom soft proof.



The only time you will see a change in colors in soft proofing is when the image you are soft proofing has a wider gamut than the target profile you are using to soft proof. For example when soft an image with a lot of deep greens to sRBG you can frequently see that these will be clipped in sRGB. 

You only need to convert your images to a different color space is when you are sending them to be displayed on a different device that has a limited gamut. Commonly you do this when send images to be shown on a website. The default colorspace for web browsers is sRGB so to have your images look as good as possible you want to have them converted to sRGB. Conveniently Lightroom has this capability built in to the Export and Publish modules. 

The other time to convert profiles is when printing. Most printer gamuts are even smaller than sRGB although this starting to change as the printer ink and print engines are getting more sophisticated. Again Lightroom has this built in to the Print module. 



Eetyaj said:


> I apologise if this is not really a Lightroom question and I should post in a monitor forum instead, but any help would be much appreciated !



Again good questions.

-louie


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## Tony Jay

Hi again Justin.

Let me continue to build on my previous post and also the useful points outlined by Louie Sherwin.

As you have noted just ticking 'soft proofing' does not necessarily change anything.
This is especially pertinent when AdobeRGB or sRGB is the destination profile.
I see changes when I softproof when the destination profile is a paper/printer ICC profile.

I will re-iterate that you want your monitor to display the widest gamut it is capable of.
Do not restrict the gamut to sRGB if the monitor is capable of a much wider gamut.

Now, if you are softproofing images for the web things are much easier than if you are printing.
If you think about it, if you generate a JPEG for web display and it isn't correct you have lost nothing but a bit of time.
It is easy to delete (if you wish) and have another go.
When printing, if you get things wrong, then the costs are bigger - actual ink and paper are consumed, in addition to the time and effort mentioned above.

In my post I introduced several tools that are available to you to guide your alteration of images for softproofing.
Before I explain how to use them it will be useful to explain what the goals of softproofing really are.
I cannot emphasise highly enough that the goal is an aesthetic one.
There is no technical softproofing nirvana of ultimate achievement.
(All right so much for hyperbole.)

I will explain softproofing with a view to producing a JPEG for web use.
Turn on softproofing.
Select the sRGB profile as the destination profile.
Turn on the destination gamut warning.
If there are no gamut warnings then generating a JPEG by exporting the image it should reproduce very well when compared to the master if you re-import the image back into Lightroom for comparison.
(If you look at that JPEG in another application that is not colour-managed then how it will actually look is anyone's guess.)

If there are large areas of gamut warning, such as in the case of my very handsome Eastern Grey Kangaroo, then how to deal with the situation is primarily an aesthetic one.
It is noteworthy that the real subject of the image, the kangaroo is not affected.
Most of the out-of-gamut areas are to be found in background areas comprising of the sunlight sandstone.
Some of the greens in the shrubs in the foreground are also out-of-gamut.
How would I deal with this scenario?
Well, I would generate a JPEG using a relative colorimetric rendering intent.
This will leave every colour that is in gamut unchanged and will map out-of-gamut colure to their nearest in-gamut colour.
Is this the end of the process? No.
I want to see how this looks (aesthetics is everything remember).
If the rendering intent that I applied results in an image that looks good with no strange unintended consequences I will accept the result.
If I don't like the fact that, say, all the out-of-gamut bright yellows have coalesced into one blocky area of identical colour when I generate the JPEG then I will try a different approach by changing the rendering intent to perceptual.
Perceptual colorimetric intent tries to keep the relationships between colours while pulling everything into the gamut of the destination profile.
It is very likely, in this instance, when I generate my JPEG, that there is an overall loss of contrast and many colours might look muted.
Back in Lightroom, to counter this, I might elect to increase the contrast and/or vibrance in softproofing mode.
The moment I start fiddling with sliders Lightroom will prompt me to make a proof copy and this I do.
When I am finished altering things I will generate another JPEG and compare it with the master in Lightroom by re-importing the image.

Lets circle back to the point about monitor gamuts: if the monitor is set up to display the widest gamut possible then you have the best idea what the master image should look like, and so, when you are comparing the master image to a proof (for printing) or a generated JPEG for exporting using either the sRGB or AdobeRGB colourspaces you are able to do the best possible comparison. The advantage of this cannot be underestimated.

Sometimes the alterations need to be global and sometimes regional.
In the example that I gave above it is my kangaroo that is important and its colour and tonal characteristics are key to the image.
The background just needs to look believable.

I think that it should be clear that there is a lot of trial-and-error but with practise it will become much easier to get the results that you want, and much quicker too.

There is another issue at play here too.
Apart from circumstances such as product photography where colour fidelity is paramount (no company will thank you for re-creating their logo that should be a very particular shade of blue as an off-beat purple) YOU are the only one that knows what the master RAW image looks like.
If you are exporting an image with a much smaller destination gamut (like sRGB) certain compromises will need to made - what they are exactly is an aesthetic choice that you need to make.
I am very fortunate that most of my softproofing endeavours go to printing from a printer with inks that, on the right paper, can deliver an extraordinarily wide gamut. Mostly all that I have to do is boost the contrast slightly - and over time, and with lots of practise, I have figured out pretty much what my changes will deliver. It is true that comparing an image that is printed (reflective medium) to an image on a monitor (transmissive medium) is not strictly possible but within those limitations the match is eerily close.

As suggested before we are just scratching the surface here and you need to learn about colour management in a systematic way to really usefully put all the information shared into the larger context.

Tony Jay


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## LouieSherwin

Hi Tony,

You have made a nice description of how and why you should look and the different rendering intents. I would like to add that rendering intents are only available in output profiles such as printer profiles. Color spaces, sRGB etc. do not have rendering intents so the technique won't work when trying to create images for the web in sRGB. 

Due to some inaccurate information on some Lightroom soft proofing tutorials, when confronted by out of gamut warnings especially when soft proofing to sRGB, some are tempted to use the saturation or color controls in Lightroom edit the soft proof to eliminate these gamut warnings. This is pretty much going to produce a worse result than if you were to just let the CMS work it's magic for you. This is because the CMS will only adjust the individual pixels that are out of gamut as opposed to a global saturation adjustment. 

Even then there may be some images that look great while editing but as you said produce large chunks of undifferentiated colors when converted to sRGB for the web. In these situations your idea of using contrast, clarity (local contrast) and even vibrance is an excellent strategy. While global adjustments might do the trick these problem areas are excellent candidates for using an adjustment brush. That way you could make some pretty drastic changes to just the problem area without effecting rest of the image. The goal being to tease out enough detail to make the converted image look decent in the smaller color space. 

Since these type of edits are probably specific to your intended conversion it would make a lot of sense to do make them on a virtual copy automatically created when editing the soft proof.

For anyone interested several excellent video tutorials on soft proofing in Lightroom, color gamuts and other color topics by Andrew Rodney, color guru, on his web site digitaldog.net. Although the soft proofing tutorials were made using Lightroom 4 everything covered applies to Lightroom 5.

Lightroom 4 and soft proofing video
Lightroom 4 and soft proofing video part 2
Video tutorial (37 min) covering Gamuts of working spaces, images and output devices. 

-louie


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## Tony Jay

Thanks for the emphasis Louie.
I did not make that particular issue crystal clear but it is worth stating here in bold that I do not "edit out" the gamut warnings and nothing in the explanation says to do this.
I guess it could be implied - after all you felt that that may have been the message.
However, I have never edited an image with that goal in mind yet.

I will clarify the role of rendering intents re: AdobeRGB and sRGB as destination profiles and report back.

Tony Jay


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## Tony Jay

As promised I went to review the process of softproofing where the destination profile is a colourspace.
Rendering intents are still applied but one is limited to relative colorimetric.
To revise again what this means is that no in-gamut colours are changed but out-of-gamut colours are mapped to the nearest in-gamut colour.
The process of softproofing is otherwise not altered.

So, thanks to Louie for pointing out the inconsistency.

Tony Jay


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## Eetyaj

Hi Tony and Louie,

Thank you very much for the extremely detailed and careful replies you both have given me. I have a much better understanding now of what I was doing wrong, and lots of new things to think about ! My mistake was assuming that setting the Adobe RGB / sRGB colour space on the monitor was the same as assigning a profile in the Windows Colour Management control panel. I know now, I need to get my calibrator to load the profile after calibration and not use the monitor buttons itself. 

One last query I have is whether it is sufficient to just use the calibrator (Spyder / ColorMunki) to calibrate AND, crucially (!), profile. I believe my old Spyder loaded the profile "onto the graphics card" (on a side note, I'm thinking of getting a colormunki Display, because the Spyder 3.0 belongs to a friend!) 

Do I still have to switch to the Spyder / ColorMunki's profile in Windows Colour Management control panel ? Or will that cause some sort of double profiling and create inaccuracies ? 

Thanks once again. The Lightroom Queen was not joking when she wrote that this forum was filled with friendly people! Not just that, friendly people who take the time to explain everything step by step !  

Justin


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## Tony Jay

Calibrating and profiling your monitor is done so that you can, hopefully trust the colours that you are viewing.
You want the profile to be operational all the time.
Monitor calibration needs to be done fairly regularly in the monitor drifts.

There wil be no issues with "double profiling".

Tony Jay


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## Eetyaj

Thanks again !


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