What is a color profile?
Welcome to my website. In this tutorial I talk about color profiles and how they affect color in you photographs. Color spaces, as photohop displays them, are basically the capacity of the profile to manage amount of colors, in other words, the profile selected will capture and record a larger or lower color range.
In my opinion the color profile will not affect the quality of your picture, if you image was shot sharp, it will remain the same regardless of the color profile. Professional photographers recommend to use the best color profile, which is ProPhoto RGB, beacuse that way you will guarantee that all the color range will be captured, specially if in your shots you capture saturated colors.
There are three main color spaces used in photography which are sRGB, Adobe RGB(1998) and ProPhoto RGB.
How color profile mistmatch affects my photos?
I will not cover the science behind color profiles and will try to explain how it affects your photographs when a color profile mistmatch your working space in photoshop.
In the picture below you can see a color profile mistmach, the photo on the left has Adobe RGB color profile and the document on the right was created as ProPhoto RGB. Notice the color shift when the photo is pasted in this document because the color profile is trying to compensate.
In this other picture you can see a color profile mistmach, the photo on the left has Adobe RGB color profile and the document on the right was created as sRGB. Notice that the colors look whashed out when the photo is pasted in this document because the color profile is removing color information to match the profile.
Photoshop offers the option to convert the color profile to match the one selected in the document you are working on to avoid these problems, but my recomendation is to work with the same profile all the way. Bear in mind that most devices can not display larger color profiles like ProPhoto or Adobe RGB, these devices can only display sRGB, so it will be a good idea to export your work in sRGB to avoid color issues when uploading files to the web or to be sent to printing services.
Conclusion
I will recommend to use the color profile that best suits your needs depending on the type of job. I´ve been using sRGB for a long time and I havent had any issues with it, in fact most of my commercial clients ask me to deliver photographs in sRGB, but every now and then there will be others that specify to use ProPhoto and deliver it that way. In that case I will set my camera to capture images in the selected profile and work in Photoshop will the same.
