Will your wedding photographer lose your colors?
01.22.10 / behind the camera / Author: G.E. Masana /
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Tags: color space in wedding photography, jpg wedding photos vs raw
Maybe because digital is still relatively brand new that many wedding photographers haven’t caught on to its nuances yet, but the format in which they capture your images is a factor in how your images look.
As you go around interviewing photographers for your wedding day, perhaps it may be smart to ask: “Do you shoot RAW or JPG (pronounced ‘jay-peg’)?”
Some will say they shoot in the RAW format, some will say JPG. Shooting in JPG mode creates an image file wherein much of the data is deleted. The file is compressed down to a smaller size and usable to immediately make photos from without any more work being done. Therefore it’s a faster process, uses less hard drive storage space and doesn’t require any more work. Many choose the format for those reasons, which may be practical, but that doesn’t make it better. Just makes it convenient… for them.
RAW, on the other hand, is just that, a file containing all the “raw” data. It’s not a processed image file like a JPG is, but rather, still needs to be processed by the photographer. That means the photographer, not the camera, works with all the data afterwards and can individually decide, after the wedding shoot, what work to do on each image, while retaining all the data to do it with.
But that’s not what I wanted to bring to your attention today. There’s a piece of information I think you ought to know that’s never spoken about.
And that’s when a camera records an image as a JPG, it’s assigned a “Color Space”.
Color space does not affect RAW, only JPGs, but more about that in a bit.
If a photographer tells you he shoots JPGs, bad enough as that may be, then you should be asking, “In what Color Space”?
If they even know the answer (cameras come with factory default settings – it’s not like this is on the minds of most photographers!), they’ll likely say, “sRGB”.
That’s the default setting anyhow.
But if you hear that, it means they’re tossing away tons of color information from your photos.
sRGB is the smallest color space available, meaning it has less colors and tones available to it than any other color space. Nuances in colors, gradations in colors and tones, all that, can never be recorded in sRGB because they’re simply not there to begin with. Instead, you’ll get colors that are somewhat off or nearby, but not exactly true to life. You won’t see smooth gradations but bumps in colors. If the image needs to be darkened or lightened, as most images do, it won’t go smoothly but it will go to another color. Maybe blueish. Maybe purplish or red, but not the next subtle shade of color tone, because it’s simply not there.
This is not the stuff of good photography.
On the other hand, the largest color space, with the most colors available, is “ProPhoto RGB”. ProPhoto RGB covers just about every imaginable color a digital camera can capture. sRGB does not. RAW files aren’t subjected to color space when photographed, but when opening them in imaging software to process them into image files afterwards, they need to be. The RAW shooter can then opt to work in a large color space at that point, having retained all the color info in the RAW file, and process the image in ProPhoto RGB, rather than delete a host of colors in a limited space like sRGB upon capture in JPG.
Are you following me?
Here’s a diagram from Canon, the camera company, to give you a visual of the limited range of sRGB colors compared to other color spaces such as ProPhoto RGB.
I shoot RAW. Then I work in the largest space available, ProPhoto RGB, so I can have it all, all the colors, I shot, to work with. The final product has to be a JPG to be compatible with the web and printers, but it’s only at that final point when all the work is done that the color space is then converted to sRGB and retains the final colors, rather than deleting a bunch of them at the time of capture and not having them to work with at all. Make sense?
It simply gives that much more of an edge to obtaining a better look in the final image.
And I just want to do what makes for a better photo.
click here to see my wedding website.
