Secret Mountain

A question often asked is “should I set my camera to use the AdobeRGB or sRGB colour space?”. There is no one correct answer so here is some information that may help you decide. In the following I am assuming you use a DSLR, or one of the better quality compacts, that gives you the choice of which colour space to use.

You shoot RAW only
If you only shoot RAW then it does not matter which you choose because the RAW file, as it’s name suggests, contains raw data from your cameras’ sensor and you would select your preferred colour space at the time of conversion. There is a whole other area of discussion as to which colour space you choose when converting your RAW file but that’s for another article.

You shoot RAW and JPEG
This is my prefered setting. I find it useful sometimes to have jpegs to hand to quickly show people or perhaps to make a quick on-line gallery. I set my camera to sRGB so the jpegs will display correctly on a web page or image viewer and I don’t have to do any post processing on them. Most of the time though I discard the jpegs and process RAW files and therefore it doesn’t matter that I have my camera set to sRGB.

You shoot JPEG only
If you shoot jpegs only then you will probably want to choose sRGB because I’m assuming you have little or no interest in post processing your images and they will therefore look as you intended when you view them on the web or on your PC (without needing software that knows about colour management). You might want to consider AdobeRGB if you are printing your images from high quality jpegs and you want to maximise the colours available to you but if you are thinking along those lines then I would suggest that perhaps you should be shooting RAW files and processing those instead.