- Digital Camera Basics: Mastering Color Controls
- The Different Colors of Light
- What Is White Balance and How Does It Work?
- Understanding Color Temperature
- Choosing When and How To Use Your Camera's White Balance Settings
- Changing Your White Balance Settings
- Auto White Balance
- White Balance Presets
- Manual White Balance
- Selecting Specific Color Temperatures
- Reality Check: Do You Need White Balance or Simply Better Exposure Settings?
- Using Your Camera's Other Color Controls
- The Indefinable Essence of Color
- Color Modes To Change Your Mood
- Vivid Versus Natural Color
- Saturating Your Colors
- Black and White
- Creating Antique-Like Heirloom Photos
- Infrared Beauty: Colors Beyond the Visible
All digital cameras use some form of RGB (which is based on the properties of light) to define the colors they capture. According to RGB, adding together equal parts of pure red, green, and blue yields white, and the absence of all color is black. The classic example of RGB is holding a crystal prism up to a window and looking at the rainbow-like spectrum of colors that it shines onto the opposite wall. Incidentally, as we explained in Chapter 1, film itself uses RGB to create color images out of what is essentially black and white film.
There are several "flavors" of RGB; the two most relevant to digital camera capture are sRGB and Adobe RGB.
All color models use mathematical designations to represent the different variations of color. RGB uses 256 (0 to 255) steps for each color. (That number should look familiar to anyone who knows the basics of computers, because 256 points of data is the amount of information inherent in 8-bit data. Since RGB has 8 bits of data for each of the three primary colors, it is a 24-bit color model, because 3 x 8 equals 24.)
Therefore, red can have a value of 0 to 255, as can green and blue. So, white is written as R255, G255, B255, and black is R0, G0, B0. Every possible color within the RGB color space can be described in this manner. For example, a certain shade of orange is R236, B149, B52.
While you won't need to know about these numbers while shooting, they will be useful to you when editing your photographs, especially should you need to match a specific color, such as a corporate logo. Many image-editing programs, like Corel PhotoPaint and Photoshop Elements 2.0, have tools for determining the RGB numerical value of any portion of the image.
sRGB VERSUS ADOBE RGB
All digital cameras that we know about use sRGB as their default working color space. Hewlett Packard and Microsoft developed this color model, which includes all the colors that can be displayed on a typical computer monitor. While it is great for images that will spend their entire existence only in computers or on the Web, it has a limited gamut. In other words, it doesn't encompass as many colors as other color models.
Some of the more advanced digital cameras can switch from sRGB to Adobe RGB. Introduced in 1998 for Photoshop 5.0, Adobe RGB was originally designated Adobe RGB 1998, a name that is rarely used today. 5.0 was the first Photoshop to have color management (see Chapter 20), and Adobe RGB was only one of several color models offered in a system that was initially, at best, a hodge-podge based on guesstimates of what should work. According to Adobe, as graphics pros, prepress experts, and photographers explored the new tools, they found that Adobe RGB was the one color model that worked best for prepress and photography workflows.
Adobe RGB includes a larger range (gamut) of colors than sRGB, especially in the blues and cyans, which is what makes it more appropriate for print output.
|Tip: Choosing the Right Color Model|
If your digital camera offers the option of changing color models (or color space), use sRGB only for photos that you plan to use on the Web, share via email, or display on a screen. Switch to Adobe RGB if the photo is destined to be printed. If you aren't sure how you'll use the picture, choose Adobe RGB because, in this situation, it's better to have too many colors than not enough.
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