Colour workspaces

[ehasler]

I'm just starting to get into digital photography and Photoshop, and am a bit stumped with the various colour workspace options that are available - e.g., Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB, sRGB etc...

What I'm trying to do is scan slides using a slide scanner, then tweak them a bit in Photoshop (remove dust, tweak colour settings etc...), then print them out on an Epson 2100 with the best quality possible.

From what I've seen and understand, ProPhoto RGB is the best space to use as it has a wide gamut most suited to 16 bit per channel images, so I've set the output space of my scanner and the working space of Photoshop to this workspace, and I assume this will give the best output results when I print the photo.

Am I right with this way of thinking? I'm still a bit of a novice, so don't have a particularly strong grasp of colour spaces and gamuts.

Any advice would be appreciated!

[ehasler]

Thanks for that Paul - I'll check out those links later, although I am actually half way through Martin Evening's book at the moment! You're right about the asprin - it's not the easiest subject to get your head around!

[ehasler]

I've found a great book which I've just finished reading which explains this subject very well!

It's called "Real World Color Management", and is written by Bruce Fraser, Fred Bunting and Chris Murphy.

If you want to find out more about profiling scanners, monitors and printers, and how to ensure that what you print matches what you scan and see on your screen, this is the book to get.

I now know what Perceptual rendering intent means!

I've now just started reading "Real World Adobe Photoshop 7" by David Blatner and Bruce Fraser, which is looking like it's going to be just as useful.

Amazon links are:

Color Management book

Photoshop book

[ehasler]

Thanks David,

Having read up on this subject, I've decided to use Adobe RGB 1998 as default, but will convert any images I put up on the net to sRGB.

I don't do that many, so this shouldn't be too much extra work.