[benhai]

First, Adobe-RGB vs SRGB doesn't matter if you are shooting RAW. It is a jpeg setting only, Second, there are many great articles about why one should always choose SRGB over ARGB. Not the least of which is that ARGB photos won't show correctly in a web brower!

Yes, but then you have to use your brain and your computer power to decide and compute. I still prefer a good lens and a good body to do the conversion instantly. I'd like to use the pictures as building materials to create something new rather than try to host all possible lights into the historiograph with the base picture.

I get paid by hardware so I prefer the hardware to do the job. I think you can save the initial cost of buying a high end body but you can't save the cost of a high end lens. lightroom are not free. I got mine with employee price which is almost free but general people will have to pay a lot. I use cs5.1 now but I found with my downgraded body my old element 4.0 works just fine to me.

I agree that if you go beyond it as a hobby then you'll need everything . And then everything will be paid by customer not your pocket then it is perfectly fine.

Happy shooting!

[Anvh]

sRGB is actually preferred when doing edits on JPG.
Yes you capture more colours with aRGB but they are spaced further apart so if you start to edit you pull them even further appart and that isn't good for the image quality and you get those bandings.

[emalvick]

Going back to the original post and question... I think you'll find that post-processing is the key to what you see in most photos and the output you see. Most of the increase in saturation, or selecting vivid, etc. can be done in post-processing and often with more control. It's not to say you can't get what you want out of the camera, but there is more room for error and adjustment if you do it in post-processing, especially if you try in RAW.

Glass, camera, settings, etc. can help but I would say that you can always make up for what may be missing from your hardware on the software end.

[shadowsonoureyes]

I tried bumping up the saturation, vibrancy etc. in the K-5 JPG processing and I found the colors were artificial-looking, particularly the reds. Everything was too red for my taste and purple burned with reds... So now I shoot mostly neutral and try to make sure I'm stopped down a bit with most lenses in most conditions - f8 seems like a good compromise.

I have found some old glass gives great colors- the M50 f/2 gives great color response. I'm keeping my eyes open for an A50 1.7 to see if that's a "grail lens" for my style.

The A 50 1.7 has lots of pop and great colour rendition.

[Lowell Goudge]

I'm a bit new to photography, and while I have made some pictures that i would consider to be fairly good, I still have a lot to learn. My first question has to do with color, how can I get some really vibrant colors? I have seen pictures taken on drab days that look amazing, but all I get is something that looks drab. The sharpness and detail of things such as the grain of wood on an old barn, how can I get these to be better? Is this a matter of technique, camera, glass, or a mix? I'm currently shooting with a canon 350D and tamron 28-300 f3.5

My experience is that you need to consider a few points relative to shooting.

Really drab days usually have very very low contrast. If you look, for example at the histogram, on your camera, you will find that the entire thing is compressed to a narrow band around the middle. You will have , as a result very little tonal range, and even if there are a lot of colors, they all have the same approximate luminosity, and things look boring.

what you can do, is in your settings, and this is camera dependant, change the WB to cloudy from sunlight, and to increase your contrast to maximum, you can also boost the saturation.

Sharpness adjustments are secondary to getting White balance correct, and getting contrast to reflect your shooting conditions