Author: Harry Guinness / Source: howtogeek.com
Color profiles define the colors we capture with our cameras and see on our displays. They control what colors are used and help provide consistency between devices.
Color is a pretty complex subject when it comes to photography. Your eyes can see far more colors than your camera can capture or your monitor (or even a piece of printed paper) can display.
This means we need some way to define the subset of colors that cameras can capture and monitors can display. We also need a way to keep colors consistent between the two. A certain shade of red that your camera captures should look the same shade of red on your monitor. This is where color spaces and color profiles come in.| 20 Free Sans Serif Fonts Business Owners Will Love | |
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How We Represent Digital Colors
While there are essentially infinite possible colors, cameras and monitors can’t distinguish between them all. Instead, they use the RGB color model. They can represent any color just by combining different values of red, green, and blue—hence the name RGB.
In the image above, you can see how purple, turquoise, a light red, and yellow are created by combining different amounts of red, green, and blue. Outside of niche professional uses, most RGB colors are given in an 8-bit per channel format. This means there are 256 possible values (0 to 255) for each of the red, green, and blue channels, providing a total of 16,777,216 possible colors.
RGB isn’t the only color space, but it’s the one used for digital applications. If you have a high end printer, or work with designers, you might occasionally run into the CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Keyline) color model as well. That color space works essentially the same, but combines four colors instead of three. A deep dive is a…
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