Cool concept!! Or a reflection in a pond. (Sort of…) Makes me smile, at any rate!
The geek in me (never repressed) wonders why you are concerned about gamut? I’ve hardly thought about it in years, with modern printing and most people having Adobe RGB monitors. Some incredibly saturated colors will convert to sRGB JPEG and retain their appearance. LR does a great job and I assume everything else these days also does. If you compare the original in LR or PS to the JPEG, you have to have crazy wild colors – the kind that can make your teeth hurt – before you see a difference, and the conversion moves things into gamut in a very realistic and pleasing way.
I want back and had a look – if I have my Proof Setup as Internet Standard RGB (sRGB) and pull up a picture with some strong colors, they get toned way down in the proof setup view, but when I export to sRGB they retain their appearance unless I really over-saturated them. But when I change my Proof Setup to Monitor RGB, they retain their colors much more and are converted realistically. I’m guessing the Internet thing is a legacy from the old days of monitors with very limited gamuts much lower than even sRGB.
I just let LR handle the conversion to an sRGB JPEG and don’t even think about it. The result always looks good on the web. But maybe I should pay more attention. There is not much I can do for people who have much older monitors, and for them all images will look equally subdued so they must think it’s normal.
I like this, Don. I’m guessing you backlit the leaf one way or another. I’m curious as to what kind of leaf it was with the all the red in the veins. In any case it’s an interesting abstract.
OK - I’m commenting before reading everyone else’s comments. It was not immediately obvious to me. And it is creepy! I’m thinking a leaf, but it also resembles blood vessels.
Dennis, I taped the leaf to a window pane. In addition to giving me backlight, that flattened the leaf and allowed me to get everything in focus. The leaf is from a houseplant that is native to Indonesia. I bought it at the grocery store. When I read up on it, I learned that it doesn’t want to be in Arizona and I figured it would die within weeks. After several months, though, it’s still with us.
Diane, my understanding is that gamut doesn’t matter much these days unless you’re going to print a photograph. Out of gamut colors turn to mud in a print. I do a couple of small-time exhibits a year and I need a lot of prints. I also have an internet gallery that people occasionally buy prints from. So I work up almost every photo on the assumption that I’ll want to print it. But maybe I’m missing something that everyone else knows.
Gamut is still an important consideration for prints, but it would come after the internet post stage. Nobody will ever be able to create a print that compares with an image on a screen, and print clients just have to accept that. It does make sense to go easy on wild colors if you want to have the posted image compare more closely to how it will print. Then at the printing stage, get the best profile you can for the printer (and the best printer) and there should be minimal appearance change in the gamut correction. You will normally want to use Relative Colorimetric rendering intent for the conversion and adjust the black point as needed for the substrate.
That correction at printing time prevents OOG colors from turrning to mud.
