Fact: Camera RAW chooses to clip highlights and shadows for all color spaces other than ProPhoto RGB.
I suppose the thinking must be “ProPhoto is a wider gamut color space, and so therefore must be better at representing the colors the camera has captured in some measurable way”.
Bunk.
It’s easy to demonstrate that the original camera data contains information that is lost. Convert an image with a very bright blue color in it to an sRGB image, and convert the same image using the ProPhoto RGB space. Look at the histograms during and after conversion.
It would be FAR more useful to convert the entire range of colors the camera has captured to fit in the target color space. Throwing away highlight and shadow data arbitrarily, while at the same time providing “recovery” capabilities, seems just plain silly. The sliders sometimes help but usually the adjustments have to be so extreme that they ruin the rest of the image. You can’t recover the lost data except to convert to ProPhoto RGB.
I really don’t want to hear that the intent is to be “true to the math”, that’s complete horseradish; there are a hundred other things Camera RAW does to tweak the data to make it more useful or pleasing. You can’t make a valid argument for intentionally clipping the data while at the same time offering a “Recovery” slider. You simply can’t.
For my needs I greatly prefer to work in sRGB space, so what I’ve done is this: I convert to ProPhoto RGB, and I’ve developed an action that “rolls off” the shadows and highlights during a conversion to sRGB so that all the information for both shadows and highlights is retained. My workflow in Photoshop starts like this: Convert, then press the F14 key (if I don’t forget). The images LOOK identical, but my sRGB result is FAR better than a direct conversion to sRGB, because I still have all the shadow and highlight data to work with.
How about fixing this so I don’t keep having to go through the extra step?
How about fixing this so the people converting directly to sRGB stop losing data their cameras have captured?
Thanks.
-Noel
