GETTING STARTED - Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process - page 29

translating digital color values to and from digital i les and output devices.
Sot ware applications, such as Lightroom, can be programmed to take
advantage of the cms, or not. (Some programs, including many Web browsers,
do not use color management at all. h is explains why the colors in a photo can
look dif erent depending on the program used to view it.)

1

Lightroom is color-managed internally; there are no options to coni gure. If
you're using a properly calibrated and proi led display, you can trust that the
colors you see on-screen are accurate. Lightroom will respect and preserve
embedded proi les in image i les, and uses a 16-bit, proprietary color space for
internal processing.

COLOR SPACES
A color space is a three-dimensional
mathematical model describing the
range of colors possible in an image
i le or on an imaging device, such as
a monitor or printer; see Figure 1-33.
Using the r gb color model, there are
several color spaces in widespread use
today. h e most common r gb color
spaces used in digital photography are:

• sr gb

• Adobe r gb (1998)

Figure 1-33

• ProPhoto

Gamut: the range of colors available
Dif erent devices (monitors, printers etc.) interpret color numbers in dif erent
ways, because of dif erences in the type of device and their primaries (their
main colors: red/green/blue, or cyan/magenta/yellow/black, etc.) No device can
reproduce all colors and all devices reproduce color dif erently. h e range of
colors that a device can reproduce (or that a digital i le contains) is called the
color gamut . A large gamut contains many colors and a small gamut has relatively
few colors available. A color gamut is described by an icc p roi le; see below.

Of the three main color spaces, sr gb has a relatively small gamut, Adobe r gb is
considered to have a relatively large gamut, and ProPhoto has the largest gamut
and is capable of containing the most possible colors.

Color spaces and their uses are discussed in more detail in Chapter 5.