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Camera Settings: Color Spaces

I am going to tell you that I'm not going to give you totally definitive answers. I'm going to explain which color spaces you would want to work in and why. But you still kind of have to make the decisions for yourself. So let's jump into that as well. Color spaces. Okay, what does it mean? And why do I care? Because I totally didn't care until my pictures printed out. Not like they were supposed to. And then I tried to figure out why what I was seeing on my monitor and and my camera was not what was printing out. And I did color calibration. It wasn't right. It was my color space that I was choosing. So let me explain here. Okay, so the main color spaces that we work with or that you have seen would be S RGB. RGB and Pro photo, the RGB that we work with is called Adobe RGB 1998. There's actually a couple other ones, ignore those you want the Adobe RGB 1998. The one you want. Okay, these from left to right is small color space the usual color space and I gigantic color space. We have t...

he ability to display and print more colours then appear in S. RGB. There's more information we can print than S. RGB has. Most of the time. We're printing our Prince often are RGB or we have monitors that can reach RGB. Pro photo is so so big that it's much bigger than what we can print and much bigger than what we can see on the monitor. All right. So let's just start with the fact that you want to x this out? No, S E R RGB ever for any reason, unless when you're exporting its for facebook export or for printing to a lab that wants S RGB, I'm gonna go into that and a little bit more depth, but the same thing as before. Like Yes, we sometimes have to we have to output at eight bit. Okay. Yeah, we have to output S RGB sometime, but I want more information to work with as I'm making changes, I need to start bigger and then if I have to export smaller, I will. So S RGB is an L um in our cameras, you can go ahead and set what color your color space you're in S RGB or RGB. You want to make sure that it's set to RGB. But if you are shooting raw, you're still capturing all that information anyway. It's more important if you're shooting with a J Peg for some reason that you need to make sure it's set to RGB in your camera when you hurt when you actually have a raw file, you're using a color space. That is more like pro photo, That raw file has a ton of information more than we can even possibly use. But you have to make a decision when you go ahead and edit in Photoshop or export to a lab or export for whatever other reason you have to make a decision what color space you want to be in. So what color space do you want to be in? The bigger the space, the more color you have, you're gonna have more accurate colors and smoother transitions. So a lot of that color banding that I had in the skin. Mm firing S RGB. It would be 100 times worse because I don't have much color to work with. It would improve as they go to RGB and even better at pro photo. The bigger space, that more flexibility. So the same thing is as I'm moving colors around and changing white balance and everything. When I work with a bigger color space, it's giving me more flexibility to work with. All right, so you've got, this is all the visual you can see. But exactly like he says, this isn't flat, it is actually a three D. There's depth because it's it's plotted on, you guys know, hue saturation aluminum. So the hue of it, the saturation of it and the luminous is the brightness. So you may have seen that as sliders that you can change in light room or in adobe camera. Raw. Well, that space is mapped out over those different tones based on the hue saturation aluminum's. But this is the nice smaller way to show this. It's a little bit more in depth than this. Okay, so first of all, your monitor is going to be a place of limitation. Less expensive monitors show you even less color. More expensive monitors will expand it a little bit but it's still not going to approach the full, full visual range of colors. Okay then the next thing is you have S RGB color space here, your monitor can many monitors can show more than S. RGB and a lot of times you can even print more than S. RGB. So you're limiting yourself, why not give yourself a little more information so that you can have the richer colors or the better color tonalities. Then you have your adobe RGB which in some places and certain colors and you can if you want to look this up, there's certain colors that um RGB shows, that's beyond monitors and blues and things like that. Um But anyway, RGB is about the size of a lot of monitors and about the size of a lot of printing capabilities, it's going to depend on the printers and depend on the paper and then when it comes down to it you've got your paper which is someplace in there. So pro photo is huge. It even goes beyond some of the visual spectrum, it captures all of this but you can't print it and you can't show it on the monitor but it gives you more flexibility to change things I told you about this, you never deliver pro photo files, nobody has any idea what to do with them. Um So this is what I recommend your workflow is in light room and your raw processing, you're working with Raw it is a 16 bit file and you are working with Pro photo like already, like that's that's what a raw file is. You're working with everything when you convert it to RGB, it's making a decision of what's getting thrown out. You want to then process it over into this is your working files, Photoshop, you're making changes, You want to be working in tiff or PSD, both are fine. You want to be working in RGB or Pro photo Giving you the most color information as possible and you want to be working with 16 bit you want to keep it as big as possible when you export but a lot of times people make you export it to smaller spaces. Alright, so here's where we want to check your file settings and this is a part that you want to write down because this is where you might not have it set up. Okay, you need to check in both Raw light your man Photoshop that you have all the right things set. So first one late room under light room preferences, external editing. So if you go to the little light room preferences, external editing, this is what you'd see. And this is saying when I open this up in an external editor, whether it's Photoshop or I mean whatever else other editing people use as you Photoshop. What file format do you want it to be? You want it to be a tiff or PSD, you're going to be editing on things. You don't want it to be a J Peg here is where you decide what color space you are going to be working in. You can set it As Adobe RGB 1998, which is the easier way or you consider as pro photo, if you want the most information possible, You set your bit depth here. So this is this kind of one of the places with a reset. If you do up updates, um, he says sometimes it reset, make sure again, this is set to 16 bit, not eight bit. So this is when you do in a light room, right click photo edit in and edits in Photoshop. This is telling it, what do you want those settings to look like? So you got to check their, okay, let's take a look at some other places. You have to check late room if you export, if you're exporting, if you're exporting for the web, these wouldn't be the same settings. You can export for web settings. But if you're exporting so that you can get them um, all these, these files ready to send off to a re toucher, maybe you want to have as much information as possible. So if you're exporting here's where you also go to file export file settings, you want to have tiff. RGB, your pro photo and 16 bits like I said, if this is being exported for web that wouldn't be the same information. But this is if you plan on working with those files in Photoshop or passing it off to a retouch or something to that effect. Okay the next one is if you're working in adobe camera Raw. So that's if you have a raw file you double click to open it up and this is what you see. Okay in the bottom these this blue link is where you decide when it opens up in Photoshop what bit depth and color space you're in. So you need to set it there. And so when I double click or when I click on this this hyperlink down here, it opens up my workflow option so I can set my color space and my dip my bits depth and resolution. So now it will stay that way um for future times like in the future when you open raw files, unless you change it. So for some reason you change it back to eight. Got to go back and change it to 16. So check this for adobe camera Raw. This is something you need to check if your for some reason using multiple for multiple versions of Photoshop or multiple computers. You got to check it on all of them. It won't it won't hold um in the file it's got a hold in the um in that adobe camera Raw. Okay now Photoshop here's another one, you have to set the workspace of Photoshop. So you're picking the color space that is working in. So if you've ever had those file warning mismatch pop up when you open up a file, it means that your photo that you just opened up. Let's say it's an S RGB and maybe you're working spaces RGB and it's telling you these don't, these are not the same and th is doing you a favor because remember how I said, consistency is what's important, it's telling you, hey, you're not being consistent, you're going to have a problem here. They aren't going to match. So what you want to do is whatever you've chosen for your um your color space, you set it here, so it's under edit color settings, working space. And you would change it here too with a pro photo or adobe RGB 1998 and it sets that as the working space for Photoshop. Okay, so here we go. We're jumping Around a little bit. So we kind of did our color space a little bit and we talked about eight bit and and 16 bit um and so another thing that you might consider is another camera you can get even more information to work with skin. Besides just using pro photo besides just using 16 bit, you can actually use another camera system for even more information. So I'm gonna tell you why you might find the need to upgrade or rent or utilize a medium format digital back system in new york for shooting beauty campaigns, makeup ads, they're not usually using a 35 millimeter camera. They're not often using a five D. Mark three in general. They're going to use a hostile beyond the digital Hasselblad or they're going to use a phase one or a leaf system and there are a couple of reasons for this. Okay, so let's start with this more um the medium format digital bags, medium format digital systems have more accurate, more faithful colors. The way that our 35 millimeter camera sensors are built is that they allow for isO sensitivity. But the way that the Bayer pattern and you know the colors in the sensor, the way that it's built is in order for it to have I. S. O. Sensitivity, light sensitivity, it's not totally color accurate. And sometimes the colors seep into different channels. That's like the really basic way of saying it. However, a lot of these phase systems or digital back systems, they're not built to be able to shoot at, you know, 200,000 I. S. So instead you would shoot a lower I. So but the color is going to be true. So it's it's called a tight pattern versus a broad pattern for how the sensors built. That doesn't really matter to you. Just know the color is more accurate. It's just the way it's built. Um it has greater dynamic range. So again, a lot of these cameras have dynamic ranges meaning the exposure that it can capture in one frame. It can capture a 14 stop range. I mean it can capture almost what the human eye can see. I mean it's huge from the darkest shadows to the brightest highlights. So it gives you a couple capabilities. One of the benefits, of course dark shadows in the skin you want to bring it up is not going to fall apart. If you were bringing up shadows captured with a 35 millimeter camera, sometimes you start to get those weird colors in the shadows. Not the same thing happens. Um when you're shooting one of these cameras, when you're shooting with a 35 millimeter camera and you photograph a really dark skin tone in a really dark area, Very dark skin tones have almost no blue information and very little green like an RGB most of the time. Dark skin tones are mostly red in the shadow in the shadow areas. You basically are just working with the red channel and there's very little information. So as soon as you want to have a gradient or lighten it up for millimeter camera, you have one channel in this much information because it's not reaching into the shadows, there's not that much information. But when you upgrade a system to a medium format digital back for example, since you have that much more dynamic range, it reaches much further into the shadows and much further into the highlights, which means, yeah, you might only have that red channel, but you've got a lot more information to work with so you can lighten it up or darken it down and it will give you a smoother gradient. So I see one of the biggest differences is when photographing skin, it's truer color to what the skin tone actually look like. Um It has insane detail, crazy like the details absolutely amazing. Um but it really, really helps and photographing darker skin tones, especially in shadow areas. There's more information there from the color range and how those sensors work.