sRGB, Adobe RGB, or ProPhoto RGB: A Practical Choice Guide

Photo color management is one of those subjects that can quickly get head-spinningly complicated. This isn’t the place for a deep dive into the topic. For that, I recommend some of the excellent resources already on the web or a book on the topic.

As much fun as rabbit holes can be, what I’m trying to provide here are some simple, practical recommendations on which colorspace to use when.

These recommendations aren’t designed as definitive — there are always exceptions, and there’s room for alternative approaches. But they’re reliable starting points. Because chances are, if you’ve found this page, that’s what you’re after.

But first, it’s worth cutting through some of the jargon.

Color space (or colorspace) and color profile are often used interchangeably. They’re technically different things. While the distinction isn’t crucial for our purposes here, it’s worth clarifying:

• A color space is the range of colors — the gamut — that the numbers in your file are allowed to describe, along with the rules for turning those numbers into specific colors.
• An ICC profile is the small chunk of data that records those rules, so your camera, editor, browser, and printer all read the same numbers the same way. One is the definition; the other is what actually gets embedded in the image. If you’re embedding or downloading, it’s usually referred to as a color profile.

And where things get extra complicated is that in digital photography color management, there are several different places and ways to use a color profile. You might have one for your display that has been created by a colorimeter. Or one for a specific combination of printer, paper, and ink. Or you might have one downloaded from a print lab for soft proofing, to give you a more accurate depiction of how the image should look when it’s printed.

There are many different color models. Two common ones are RGB and CMYK. Another, YUV, is typically used in video production. In digital photography, RGB is by far the most important and is the one I’m focusing on here.

Some of the most common RGB ICC profiles you’ll come across for photography are sRGB IEC61966-2.1 (I’m going to refer to it here simply as sRGB), Adobe RGB (1998), and ProPhoto RGB. There are many others — and there can be an infinite number because you can create custom profiles — but those are the most common in digital photography these days.

Which color space is best for . . .

General use

Safest Choice: sRGB

The safest option in most uses is sRGB. While it’s not the largest color space and isn’t ideal for high-quality imaging applications, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a device or app that doesn’t handle files embedded with the sRGB colorspace as you’d expect.

So a good rule of thumb is: if in doubt, use sRGB.

Sharing images on the web

Best choice: sRGB

Alternate: Untagged (most browsers and web applications will assume sRGB)

sRGB has become the defacto standard for displaying images on the web. It’s the safest bet if you want to share your photos on the web in any way. And I’m taking a broad view of that — it includes social media and websites. It also includes sending photos to friends via email if they’re just going to view the photos or share them online. If you’re uploading to Facebook or Instagram, stick with sRGB — it’s hard enough to make the images look good on social media sites without making it more complicated.

Adobe RGB isn’t as bad of a choice as it used to be. Back in the day, browsers didn’t know how to translate the Adobe RGB colorspace and the images, therefore, display as flat, dull, and unsaturated. For the most part, that’s no longer true: modern browsers handle Adobe RGB just fine. But there’s still an element of risk that your viewer might be using a device or app that doesn’t know how to use Adobe RGB. And browsers’ ICC support is inconsistent. But there are some situations where you might want to choose Adobe RGB. I often use Adobe RGB, for example, for uploading my images to galleries that will be displayed on the web but so that the images can also be downloaded and licensed for publication use. But for regular web or social media use, I use sRGB or strip out the color profile completely.

In some instances, you might want to remove the colorspace information completely. This is something that comes up particularly in optimizing images for the web to make them as small as possible by stripping out non-essential metadata. Most web applications assume that an image file without an embedded ICC profile should be treated as though it’s sRGB.

Image editing

Best Choices: ProPhoto RGB or Adobe RGB

In a controlled, closed editing workflow, you may as well use the widest gamut you practically can. For a long time, that meant Adobe RGB. Thanks to Lightroom, ProPhoto RGB is now a popular choice (and what I use) and has an even wider gamut.

sRGB isn’t a bad choice for image editing, and if that’s all your software supports, then there’s no harm in using that. But if you have the wider gamuts available, you may as well make the most of them.

Your monitor’s gamut is a separate question from your working space. A wide-gamut display that covers most of Adobe RGB or DCI-P3 lets you actually see more of what’s in an Adobe RGB or ProPhoto file, but only in apps that manage color properly — in ones that don’t, the same file just looks oversaturated. And a bigger gamut doesn’t make the screen accurate: that comes from calibrating it. If you’re not calibrating, leaving the monitor in its sRGB preset gives you the most predictable results.

One thing to know if you go with ProPhoto RGB: it’s so wide that it includes colors no monitor or printer can reproduce, and even some that the eye can’t see at all. That isn’t a problem in itself, but the same number of steps has to cover a much bigger range of color, so in an 8-bit file the gaps between neighboring values are wider. Push contrast or saturation hard and you can end up with banding in skies and other smooth gradients. If you’re editing in ProPhoto RGB, work in 16-bit and only convert down when you export.

Sending photos to clients

Best Choice: sRGB

If you want to save yourself the headache of having clients complain that their images are flat, dull, and washed out, send them in sRGB. Unless your client is an imaging professional, in which case, see below.

Sending files to a graphic designer or magazine photo editor

Good Option: Adobe RGB

Another Good option: sRGB

Imaging professionals such as graphic designers and photo editors should have no trouble at all dealing with color profiles and will convert them to their working profile of choice (print magazines, for instance, might well be using CMYK rather than RGB). They probably have (or should) have a color-managed setup and workflow as good or better than yours.

If you’re curious what they’re converting to, the common CMYK press standards in North America are GRACoL — General Requirements for Applications in Commercial Offset Lithography — which covers sheetfed presses on coated stock, and SWOP — Specifications for Web Offset Publications — which covers web offset presses and lighter papers. Both come with matching ICC profiles, and you’ll see older Photoshop-era versions of them still floating around in profile lists. Converting to one of them yourself is almost always the wrong move, though: the designer or printer knows the press, ink, and paper, and you don’t. Send your files with RGB color profiles and let them do the conversion.

AdobeRGB used to be the defacto standard for this kind of work years ago, but it’s much less important now. Part of that is because the diversity of image sources that imaging professionals receive from is now huge. It used to mainly professional photographers or stock agencies; now, it could be anyone with a smartphone. So, in short, send them whatever you have — they’ll almost certainly be able to convert it if need be.

Sending photos to a print lab

Safest Choice: sRGB

Better Choice: Adobe RGB (but only if the specific print lab supports and recommends it — some only include sRGB in their recommendations).

Better print labs will have a recommendation on their website as to what specific colorspace you should embed in your file (note that this is different from the soft proofing profiles that some labs provide). For instance, here are direct links to the recommendations from some popular print labs: White House Custom Colour | BayPhoto | Shutterfly | Nations Photo Lab |

Most will start with Adobe RGB or sRGB, and it’s a safer bet to stick with one of the commonly used colorspaces. As a technical matter, their high-end imaging equipment and software should be able to translate any colorspace that’s embedded into the file — even if their equipment can’t necessarily reproduce the full gamut — but there’s an element of risk in that until you’ve had a chance to test with a specific lab.

sRGB is safe, but for many print labs, it means you won’t be taking full advantage of the capabilities of those fancy printers they use. Aside from some specialist labs where I’ve had the chance to test the results, I generally use Adobe RGB. It’s still a safe option but has better potential than sRGB.

It’s always highly recommended to embed an ICC profile into the images that you’re sending to a print lab. If you don’t embed an ICC profile in the images you send, most labs’ software will treat it as sRGB. If that’s an incorrect assumption, you can end up with unexpected color shifts and inconsistent results.

Another thing to watch is that your image is properly saved as RGB and not CMYK.

Camera color space settings

Many cameras these days give you a choice in the options of using sRGB or Adobe RGB. These apply to JPGs created in the camera. They’re not applied to RAW files (but might show up in the embedded JPG thumbnails).

There’s a side effect that catches people out. Under the DCF file naming standard that cameras follow, a JPG shot in Adobe RGB gets a leading underscore, so a Nikon file comes out as _DSC1234 instead of DSC_1234, and Canon’s becomes _MG_1234. Nothing is wrong with the file, but it can scramble filename sorting, and it’s a quick way to tell at a glance which color space a JPG came out of the camera with.

The same sorts of considerations apply in choosing which to use. The safest and simplest is sRGB. And that’s what the camera will almost certainly have set as the default. Especially if you’re sharing directly to the web, stick with sRGB.

Adobe RGB potentially gives you a wider set of colors to work with (obviously, the scene you’re shooting matters here too). So you can make the argument that it gives you higher potential quality, especially for editing the image. But editing JPGs is inherently less than ideal, and if you’re shooting for maximum quality, you’re usually better off shooting in RAW on those cameras that support it.