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Track 5 · Digital2 min read

LESSON 22

Colour and profiles

Why one picture looks one way on your screen, another on a phone, and a third on paper.

TWO COLOUR SPACES · SAME RED, SAME BLUE

Two triangles of colour: the larger Adobe RGB triangle reaches further toward green than sRGB; their red and blue corners match.

Every device has its own colour

A monitor shows colour differently from how a printer can make it, and two screens differ from each other. Colour management gives each device a profile and uses the profiles to translate colour from one to the next.

Gamut

A gamut is the set of colours a device, or a colour space, can represent. A larger gamut holds more colours; what lies outside a device's gamut it cannot show.

sRGB and Adobe RGB

sRGB, proposed by HP and Microsoft in 1996, is the standard for the web and the space assumed for a picture that carries no profile. Adobe RGB (1998) is wider, mostly in cyan and green, and was designed to reach most of the colours a CMYK printer can make.

Profiles in practice

A screen can be profiled with a colorimeter. Edit in a wide space if you print, export sRGB for the web, and keep the profile embedded in the file, so other software reads the colours as you meant them.

Try it today

  1. 01Open one picture on your computer, your phone and a friend's screen.
  2. 02Note which looks warmer or more saturated.
  3. 03Check that your editor exports sRGB with the profile embedded.
  4. 04If you print, order one small test print.
  5. 05Compare it beside the screen in daylight.

Figures from Wikipedia, 'Color management', 'Gamut', 'sRGB', 'Adobe RGB color space' and 'ICC profile', read 2026.10.16. The triangles are drawn from the published primaries of each colour space. The steps under Try it today are working practice, not a standard.