Digital Light & Color

Suppose one shoots a handful of standard subjects e.g. sunsets, foggy days, some foods, a couple landscapes, some flowers, and a few people, and then converts from raw, processes and prints using Adobe RGB throughout, and then does the same using sRGB throughout, and then examines the prints side-by-side, how visible, really, is the difference in the appearances? It is easy to find web examples that claim to show the differences, but how can such examples mean anything since the web and browsers use sRGB? I've done some casual looking, but I've not been able to find what portions of the different color spaces the ink sets for the standard high quality Canon and Epson cover using some standard for the illumination of printed color.

Most of the difference between the two color spaces is in very saturated greens, so any difference would tend to show up there.

I have two monitors connected to one of my computers -- a big one that can reproduce almost 100% AdobeRGB and a smaller one that struggles to reproduce 100% sRGB. When the same image is displayed on both, the difference is quite obvious, but this is not the question you asked.

My guess is that the difference in prints would be minimal, mostly because the perceptual rendering intent stretches the image gamut to fill the printer gamut so AdobeRGB would just the stretched a little less, but I have not performed the experiment. This gamut mapping is performed during the printing process and tries to map the image color space to the set of colors the printer can reproduce.

Printer and monitor gamuts are mismatched enough that even in an ideal world, at least some images can be difficult to print and require several iterations. The main advantage of AdobeRGB in my opinion is that if you set your camera to use it and have a monitor that supports it, it can give you a better preview of the print.

Thank you.