Looking at colour managment and colour space

On my Photoshop course we looked at colour management.  I have read a lot about it but it was a good opportunity for me to find out if I was on the right track and had understood everything I had read.  I do find learning some of this stuff from a book soul destroying at times so I was pleased to have some face to face tuition on this subject.  

The specific problems we encounter with colour management is when our images on screen don't match those that we have printed.  

There are three Digital colour systems:

1. RGB - Red, Green and Blue channels.  Colour in relation to screens and cameras
2. CMYK - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key.  This relates to printing
3. LAB - lightness, green to red, blue to yellow channels

The most common systems that we encounter on a daily basis would be RGB and CMYK.  

In order for our on screen images to match our prints we need to use a universal colour management system - ICC.  This ensures that all software and hardware are adhering to a set of specific colours.  Prior to this printer manufacturers had colour systems unique to them which made printing a big issue.  

We can use a tool like Color Checker to set a profile for our cameras as cameras tend to render some colours differently.  You would do this if getting the colours 100% accurate was very important for a specific image.  

Colour space is essentially the colours you decide to work with on your computer.  There are a number of colour spaces:

• sRGB
• Adobe RGB (1998)
• ProPhoto RGB (this is the widest range)

This graph shows us the difference in colour numbers is each of the above. As we can see ProPhoto offers the most colours, more possibly than the naked eye can see.  

In order to ensure your monitor accurately displays colours you need to profile it regularly using a tool like ColorMunki.  I do this on a regular basis and I have found that my prints are now more accurate than before.  I don't tend to have colours that vary too much although there might be slight variations.  I still have problems with black and white images at times though as they often come out with a pink hue.  

In my workflow I have added colour space - I will use RGB for website and screen work and Adobe RGB for print.  This would mean having two separate files for a single image if you were going to use it online and then print it.  

In relation to camera settings I always shoot RAW so therefore I do not need to adjust camera settings as I will set the colour space in Lightroom or Photoshop.