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sRGB vs Adobe RGB: The Truth –article reprint by Will Crockett.
Controversy, arguments, name calling, forum flaming. Over world politics? Taxes? paper or plastic? Nope, over color spaces for professional photography! Should you use the sRGB color space or the Adobe RGB color space? The answer is... both! Shootsmarter.com is dedicated to helping you shoot smarter and to do that you need to use the right tool for the job. If you’re shooting for an editorial client or an Annual Report job, ask the client which color space they would like their images delivered in and most likely they will tell you the Adobe RGB space. It’s the graphical standard. Then guess what? Shoot / process / deliver the images in Adobe RGB. Simple. But say you want to create images to make photographs (prints), THEN what’s the right answer? In most cases (not all), it’s sRGB. Here’s why. You need to place the digitally captured photos you create in a digital container to move them properly from the camera, through Photoshop, or directly to a lab for printing. This digital container is described in great detail by the ICC profile you select as your color space. sRGB as you probably know, is the name of an ICC profile (also called a color tag) that describes the sRGB color space. That’s all it is, just a digital container to hold a digital file. Well, for most portrait, wedding, senior, even commercial and advertising “people shots” created with small format digital (35mm style) the actual data that your digital camera collects will look something like this:

There’s all the highlight and light colored pixel info at the top, the mid tone info in the center, and the dark toned and shadow pixel info on the bottom. We can’t just send this file to a printer or into Photoshop without putting it in a container, if we do it will cause the printer or PS to guess at the real color values of the data. Instead, we’ll use a container that not only hold the data in place, but helps to describe the color values that we have captured. The choice for most photographers is to either use the AdobeRGB container or use the sRGB container selected inside the camera at time of capture, or later as the working space in Photoshop.