I was curious /gd/, how many of you actually care about the

I get pretty annoyed with the CMYK color space (or gamut ?) for how limited it is and how many of what I consider "beautiful" colors are excluded by it. Never had much problems with Adobe RGB, so I don't really think about it

Honestly, unless I'm designing for print I don't really worry about it. I don't do video or super high-profile stuff and 99.9% of normal people don't have their displays calibrated properly anyway.

Maybe I should start considering these things, though. How important is this shit when your work is only output digitally anyway?

>>317392
where i can learn about it?

>>317400
It makes some difference, although it is rarely noticeable to the untrained eye, but it never hurts to get it right although it is way down on your list of priorities when designing a project

>>317400
Agree with you here. Most of the clients I've worked for will usually accept SWOP CMYK and sRGB as a color space for their respective print or digital viewing space. I suppose you could if you were a stickler for quality, but the average joe who pays you to design their business cards or promotional materials doesn't know jack shit about color space, much less have the eye to notice clashed in gamut.

Work with that you know and what makes you feel good about your final piece.

>>317443
While I see where you're coming from, how come I don't see the same line of logic in audio professionals (or even video professionals) when they deal with very similar laymen audiences?

s

>>317463
You got me there. I don't know a single thing about audio quality (and quality compression?) when translated to lower-quality playback devices, and video formatting isn't something I'm particularly qualified to make a comment on either, but here goes nothing...

I'm thinking it has to do with quality being more noticeably incremented. If, for example, you're listening audio through a garbage speaker, it's whatever. However, as the quality of the playback device increases, the quality has often noticeable and easily measurable improvements as the playback device is better equipped to produce the sound as originally composed. I'll liken this to when I got my first Sennheiser headphones over the cheap gas station ear buds I've always had prior: the jump in quality is phenomenal, and I'm still not playing the audio back on anything that's studio quality. (con'd below...)

>>317481
On the other side, what if you did switch the color space from sRGB to Adobe RGB 1998 for instance? What do you get according to the chart? Some more greens and blues, colors with more cool tones, but the reds and violets are largely unaffected. Unless your design hinges on A) Green tones and B) it doesn't ever need to hit a printing press, it'll barely be noticeable to the untrained eye. Even if you dial it all the way up to the ProPhoto color space, it'll be amazing to look at but what're the chances you need that many colors? This is more of a concern for photographers than graphic designers as detailed and color-accurate photos are what all realistic photographers strive for. Oh, and you might get some posterization when working in anything less than 16-bit color when in ProPhoto. (There's also a lot of math and color science behind this I'm no expert on. You might wanna ask someone at ICC about it cause I might be over-simplifying this).

In general, if your design ever needs to hit a printing press, you gotta be really calculating how it'll come out on the final print run. Your crazy-huge RGB gamut is gonna be cut down by a lot. Paper, gamut, hell even the type of printing method used can make a big difference. For RGB space, hey, go crazy - just understand for higher quality ProPhoto pictures, they'll need to be 16-bit files, and thus larger in size.

So, in short, there's more to worry about with results that aren't going to be blowing anyone away unless they're really, really into authentic color representation.

>>317463
I mean, you kind of do. A ton of Top 40 music is pretty poorly-mixed because they're "designing" it for a demographic that doesn't care about that stuff - nobody's spinning Drake or Taylor Swift on vinyl or listening to 15GB .FLAC albums through tube amps, so they don't have to invest their time making sure those "color spaces" are properly utilized.

Hell, I was watching The Defenders on Netflix the other day and noticed quite a few production mistakes - really amateur stuff like mic levels not being stabilized after a jump cut (if you wanna see what I'm talking about this in the first 10 minutes of Episode 4, with Daredevil's mic when they first gather around the table) and lighting inconsistencies on keyed shots (final episode, the lighting on Luke Cage when they first get to the bottom of the pit). A studio with as big a budget and as much as experience as Marvel is absolutely beyond that kind of stuff, but they decided that it wasn't worth fixing because the audience wouldn't care, if they even noticed it at all.

It's a numbers game. Your time is worth X dollars per hour, converting a project to the proper color space will take Y amount of time, will the client be willing to eat that cost?

>>317502
That said, if you're not doing really basic shit like making sure to convert stuff to CMYK before print (and manually changing the colors when it looks off) you're just bad at your craft.

Hi there, I'm a designer working for a photography business.

We care about gamut due to priting photographs. It is a bit different than normal mass-production printers as they use CMYK. We use Adobe RGB 1998. Having CMYK in most cases makes a noticeable difference. The colours become less "vivid", and some even end up looking horrible. So there's that.

As for ProPhoto, we don't go there due to it mostly only adding greens in return for bigger file sizes. Having thousands of customers where the avarage finished file size is 250MB each (usually 10-50 of em at the end), it takes a lot more space in the long term. Many of the photos do not contain much green, thus not worth.

There's also a matter of bit depth that has an impact.
When you publish digitally or at some point export images in for example JPG or PNG, it will automatically become 8-bit (bpc). Most screens are 8-bit. It gives the "true colour" of 16.6 Billion colours or something. That's good enough, but as studio photographers (well, my co-workers) there's a lot of plain backgrounds. This causes colour banding in 8-bit since it only gives 256 "shades". Especially with black background it becomes very visible. Starting out with 16-bit (bpc) in photoshop helps eliminate that problem — which also shows up in print.

This used to be a problem for my co-workers until I started looking in to colour space and the likes. If the image contains many colours, it is not necessary. Furthermoe you also need both a GPU and screen that can support it, as well as a cable that can handle the data transfer between screen and GPU. Most modern NVIDIA GTX series has support for 10-bit colours, which you need to manually enable.

[1/2]

[2/2]

Forgot to mention, that sRGB too makes a noticeable difference on our screens (and in print).


When working with design in general I tend to start off with maxed quality. If I get it as close to perfect as possible, then the difference is narrower. Note that you should also look in to embedding colour profiles and converting to sRGB if you are saving for web in PS (BEFORE you save as). Browsers read colours differently, so embedding help normalize the difference in colour appearance.

I am by no means an expert on this, but I try to find out as much as possible about it. It has proven to help for quality.