Your regular update from the world of colour management

In this month’s Colour Confidence newsletter…
Free delivery until 31st August	English Version of our newsletter
This month’s new arrivals	Deutsche Version des Mailings
Star product	Version française de cette newsletter
Deal of the month	El boletin de noticias en Español
Colour Confidence Profiler – special educational offer	Nederlandse versie van de Nieuwsbrief
Special clearance offers	Polska wersja naszego biuletynu
Colour Confidence Technical Tips
Tell us what you think

Free delivery until 31^st August

One of our most popular promotions is back – order by 31^st August and get free delivery on most orders within the UK and mainland Europe, with no minimum spend! Simply place your order as normal, and the cost of carriage will automatically be deducted from your order. See our website for full Terms and Conditions.

This month’s new arrivals

Colour Confidence is now offering new edition PictoColor software – all Adobe Photoshop CS3 compatible:

Star product – the Eye-One Photo SG

Digital photographers in need of a comprehensive colour management system should look no further than the Eye-One Photo SG. Using the Eye-One Pro measuring device and a range of Eye-One Match software modules, the Photo SG offers advanced, accurate colour control for monitors, RGB printers, digital cameras and scanners. This excellent package is currently available at the special price of £925/€1525 – a major saving on SRP.

Deal of the month – 30% off ColorVantage inks

Developed by the colour experts at Pantone, ColorVantage inks boast a wide gamut, rich colours and superior lightfastness. These optimised pigment inks are excellent alternative inks for Epson printers, and for a limited period, we're offering a 30% discount on the most popular products in the range. If you haven’t tried ColorVantage inks before, this offer is the ideal chance to see how they can enhance your prints.

Colour Confidence Profiler – special educational offer

Colour Confidence is currently offering a promotion no academic institution can afford to miss. If you are looking to teach your students the benefits of colour management, or simply want to ensure colour consistency between your digital devices, we have a solution which is both comprehensive and cost-effective. The Colour Confidence Profiler provides accurate monitor calibration and high-end printer profiling at excellent value - and now colleges, universities or any educational department can purchase the system at a special price.

Special clearance offers

Don’t forget to check out our Clearance section – there’s a range of bargains to be had on end of line or ex-demonstration stock. We only sell high quality items from trusted manufacturers, and all products come with a 12 month warranty, unless otherwise stated. If you don’t see anything you like now, remember to keep checking back; we’re adding new items to the Clearance section all the time.

Colour Confidence Technical Tips – sRGB or Adobe RGB?

If you do not understand colour management sufficiently to answer the above question yourself, the answer is that you will be better off using sRGB. However, that does not infer that if you do understand colour management using AdobeRGB will be a better choice. The basic difference is quite simply that Adobe RGB defines a larger colour-space than sRGB. The following points may help give justification to your decision to work within either the Adobe RGB or sRGB colour-space.

The key advantage of Adobe RGB

• Colours of a stronger saturation can be defined when working in Adobe RGB. In practical terms of ink on paper, this means that some colours which use the Cyan – Yellow range of printing inks will not be reproduced at their full intensity when working in sRGB. The strongest Cyan printing colour that can be defined within sRGB equates to a 75% intensity of a Cyan printing ink, 85% of Green or 95% of Yellow, dependent on your ink and paper combination. Because of this, Adobe RGB is the preferred source colour-space for conventional print when converting to a press CMYK.

The key disadvantages of Adobe RGB

• Monitor capabilities – Most monitors (all CRT and all but a few specialist wide gamut LCD displays) can only display up to the sRGB colour space; therefore the increased intensity of colours definable within Adobe RGB is not actually visible on screen. While sRGB may sound restricting in terms of colour vibrancy, the greater saturation of Adobe RGB colours is not necessarily that ‘natural’, and in practice may only be relevant to a few percent of the pixels in your general photographic imagery.
  
  
• Colour quality – Colour in RGB is defined in steps; from white through to the most saturated level of Red, Green or Blue. Therefore the larger the colour space, the larger the steps have to be, as there will always be the same amount of steps in the range. Working in a smaller colour gamut (sRGB) means smaller steps, i.e. less of a colour jump from one step to the next. As such, an image that only uses sRGB colours will contain a larger range of intermediary colour values, resulting in smoother colour transitions.
  
  
• Common use of sRGB – Web browsers automatically interpret images as being in sRGB, so for colour accurate display online, images should be in sRGB. Cameras without a specific Adobe RGB setting are more likely to capture images closer to the sRGB colour-space than Adobe RGB. Most photo labs will assume images are in sRGB, so sending images for external processing in that format may produce more accurate results. Most desktop inkjet printers also have default print settings closer to sRGB than Adobe RGB.
  
  
• Converting images to a printer colour space – Visible colour shift is more likely when starting from Adobe RGB. When converting from sRGB, the ‘Relative Colorimetric’ intent combined with ‘Use Black Point Compensation’ can be used to achieve a good colour match. When converting from Adobe RGB, the ‘Perceptual’ intent is safer to avoid clipping colours, but this can result in a slight colour shift in the image.

In summary, working in sRGB is the best route to accurate colour for many users. However, once you understand and appreciate the potential pitfalls of working in Adobe RGB, you are in a far better position to benefit from its advantages. If you need more information on colour-spaces or anything colour management related, why not download our free Guidance Document?

Tell us what you think

We’re currently updating our newsletters to give you more of what you want to hear – so we need to hear what you want! Are you looking for more technical advice? Extra special offers? Send us your comments to help us create newsletters you want to read.

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