Okay... now my head hurts...
I have been pouring over a myriad of articles on the Internet, three new already slightly dog eared books sitting on my desk, and associated magazines from the library in the last four weeks in anticipation of my first digital camera arriving. Cramming for the arrival of the camera as it were...
Color management and color space are two of the main items in the brave new world I'm about to enter that I'm still somewhat bewildered with. I feel fairly well prepared to sally forth armed with a new K10D, a 24" monitor, and Photoshop CS on the 'puter (my wife's, the graphics guru who has already told me I'm on my own) to deal with the aftermath.
RAW, I understand, but the decisions related to colorspace I don't. I certainly do understand that the professionals and very serious amateurs will want and need something much different than people like me. But beyond that point, confusion reigns.
What works for the unwashed masses out there whose images mostly end up being displayed on the web, decent monitors at home, and the occasional printout at Costco? It seems the answers point in all directions, ranging from stuff like Ken Rockwell (yes, I have come to realize many regard him as being just slightly better than the Anti-Christ)
claiming sRGB is the answer, to Luminous Landscape and the
article on ProPhoto RGB (thanks for that excellent link). Rockwell typifies the "keep it in the default mode" arguments I have read and sounds quite logical in doing so - of course as they say, on the Internet nobody knows if you're a dog. The Luminous Landscape article and some of you folks here advocate the other side of the coin.
Bottom line: having read all of it, I'm left going "Huh?" And my head hurts...
I suspect I'm more or less typical. I'll have a very competent camera, and I have a pretty good monitor and one piece of pretty good software along with whatever Pentax software my camera arrives with. It's unlikely I'll be printing at home when I want prints, my graphic artist skills are limited beyond doing cartography layout, and I mostly want to practice photography, not graphic artistry. I don't even know if my wife the graphics guru and her masters in fine arts is really knowledgeable about the colorspace issue (I do know she has no interest in the 'puter or talking about it once her workday is done...).
So where is Joe Sixpack (if there is such a thing) at the end of the day? Buy a device to calibrate my monitor? Well that makes great sense and works for me - already in the works.
But beyond that will my hobby profit from and enjoy teaching myself all about color profiles, and all the cool little settings in all my software? Will I even see a difference when most of the viewing of my images will be over the Internet or on computer monitors in homes? Particularly if Joe Sixpack has a less than finely tuned eye for colors in the first place?
I'm confused further because as a GIS Analyst I knock off some pretty darned impressive maps with all kinds of cool graphics on them using an HP1050C plotter. I do it almost every day. They come straight out of ArcMap - a program which is most definitely not focused on high end graphics manipulation. The stuff printed on the photo glossy paper for public presentations and whatnot really catches the eye. All of that is done straight from the default driver for that plotter - if there's settings for different colorspace settings, I haven't even noticed them in the three years I've been running plots out of that machine.
At present, I take some confidence from the fact that I will always have the original RAW files somewhere. Should I get smarter later on in my journey through the digital world, or realize I have made a mistake in my choices and settings regarding color, well, I can always go back to square one with the original files and start all over again, correct? But who wants to start all over again?
So... is there any kind of general concensus on whether Joe Sixpack should stick with sRGB, step one up to Adobe RGB, or go whole hog and flounder around trying to get everything set up properly in ProPhoto RGB?
I suppose if I didn't live out in the sticks there'd be some continuing education class somewhere that I could spend a weekend playing around and getting this all straight in my head.
Thanks in advance for any attempts to make sense out of all this for the Joe Sixpacks out there...
Edited to add: Did mattdm just adress just this in the message he posted while I was writing this?