Originally posted by biz-engineer The problem of ProPhoto RGB is that there is no display , nor printer than can show as much as ProPhotoRGB color gamut, the limit will be the maximum the display can do, Adobe RGB seems to be the max for the best monitors.
Whilst it would be nice, it doesn't matter so much that you can't see the entire ProPhoto RGB gamut on your display or printer. Using ProPhoto RGB as your working colour space when editing on, say, a 100% sRGB monitor won't allow you to see saturation outside the sRGB gamut (due to the limitations of the monitor), but you
will see the ProPhoto RGB representation for tones that fall within the monitor's profiled gamut, and that will be less compressed than with the sRGB working space... images should look somewhat "richer", depending on content. Furthermore, and most importantly, by working in ProPhoto RGB you'll retain and apply edits to a much wider representation of the "real world" colour captured by the camera's sensor, instead of shoe-horning it into a narrower colour space such as sRGB or AdobeRGB at the point of editing. Finally, soft-proofing can be used to see how the image will look with sRGB and other output profiles (depending on the capabilities of your display). As I see it, you lose nothing by working in ProPhoto RGB, and gain a lot.
I guess, ideally, every one of us ought to edit in a ProPhoto RGB working space - and soft-proof - on a monitor with the widest available gamut, and output only to profiled devices with gamuts no bigger than our monitor can fully represent. Only that way can we be sure that we're seeing every tone represented in our working colour space and output-profiled files. In practice, though, most of us have monitors that don't even display the entire sRGB gamut, while some have 100% sRGB, and a small percentage have 100% AdobeRGB. But
all of us will be able to see the tonal expansion (or, rather, lack of tonal compression) when working in ProPhoto RGB, even if we only see the range that fits within our monitor's profiled gamut.
Dave - I believe what you're seeing when working in ProPhoto RGB is the lack of tonal compression you'd have experienced in the sRGB colour space...