Choosing the right color space for your photography workflow directly impacts how vibrant and accurate your images appear. The difference between a stunning sunset with rich gradients and one that looks flat and posterized often comes down to this technical but crucial decision that many photographers make without understanding the consequences.
Coming to you from Greg Benz Photography, this comprehensive video breaks down color spaces in both theory and practice with clear visual examples. Benz demonstrates the limitations of the ubiquitous sRGB color space by using Mac's Color Sync Utility to show how sRGB captures only a fraction of the colors humans can actually see. Through side-by-side comparisons, he reveals how much wider color spaces like Display P3, Adobe RGB, and Rec 2020 can represent significantly more colors, particularly in cyans, greens, magentas, and reds. This matters enormously for subjects like vibrant sunsets, colorful birds, or ocean scenes where the broader gamut means not just more saturated colors but often better detail preservation in highly saturated areas.
The three-dimensional nature of color spaces is another critical concept Benz explains that's often overlooked. While we typically view color spaces from a top-down perspective (showing saturation and hue), there's also a luminosity component that determines how bright colors can get. This becomes particularly relevant when dealing with HDR displays, as P3 and Rec 2020 allow certain colors to achieve greater brightness than sRGB, resulting in more natural gradations in bright colored areas like sunset clouds, where sRGB might produce artificial-looking bands or block up completely.
When it comes to practical applications, Benz shows how choosing smaller color spaces like sRGB or P3 in Adobe Camera Raw can result in channel clipping even during editing, giving you misleading previews and potentially causing you to back off edits unnecessarily. Working in 16-bit files with either ProPhoto RGB or Rec 2020 preserves the maximum color information throughout your editing process. The difference becomes strikingly apparent in his example of a sunset image, where the clouds in the wider gamut spaces show delicate gradients and details that get compressed into flatness in sRGB.
Check out the video above for the full rundown from Benz, including his practical advice about when to use each color space for different output situations and how to test if your preferred sharing platforms support wide-gamut color profiles.
