Photoshop Tutorial: Adobe RGB vs Standard RGB at All Day I Dream About Photography

Photoshop Tutorial: Adobe RGB vs Standard RGB

November 23rd, 2006 by Antoine Khater

This is not really a tutorial but rather a useful info for newbies, did you ever spend time retouching a picture in Adobe Photoshop and when you finally reached the look you want you upload it to your website just to notice that it looks dull and flat?

Well this is a very common mistake for any newbie, I am not going to go deep into the technicalities, but to keep a very long story short most DSLRs can take pictures in one of two color spaces Adobe RGB (aRGB) and Standard RGB (sRGB).
aRGB is larger than sRGB, so it is safe to say that sRGB is a subset of aRGB so yes shooting in aRGB will give us more colors to work with.
On another hand web browsers cannot resolve all the colors in the aRGB color space, that’s why a picture posted on the internet using the aRGB color profile will look dull and flat. What to do?

The solution is pretty simple, shoot in aRGB mode¹ do all the needed retouching work and then convert the picture you want to upload to the internet to the sRGB profile. You can do this from Adobe Photoshop from the Image->Convert to Profile and choosing the sRGB.
N.B.: Make sure to save only the web copy in sRGB, leave the original in aRGB for printing or future use.

Here is a quick example to illustrate the difference, this is the same picture taken by Habib Khoury just saved with, respectively, aRGB and sRGB color profiles, can you see the difference?

aRGB