I've recently received quite a few emails asking about the color features in photolab
so I'm using this video to share my top tips to help you achieve better color let's start
with a feature that was introduced in photolab 6 which is the working color space the color space
is a range of colors that can be reproduced in an image it's often shown as a graph on a grid
like this here we can see the three color channels red green and blue represented on the chart we can
then draw the color space over this to include the possible colors it contains when we edit an
image in a small color space like sRGB it limits the range of colors we can use that's why it's
better to use a larger working color space which is why dxo introduced the wide gamut color space
look there's more to this than just selecting one of these two color spaces watch the following
carefully because it can get confusing if you miss something this photo is set to use the wide gamut
color space but I hadn't set the color rendering yet despite this we can still see a color image
which suggests there must be a default rendering that's automatically applied to raw files
when I turn on the color rendering panel you can see the generic rendering category selected
then below this we see the rendering set to neutral color now if I turn the panel off and
on it doesn't make any difference to the image this tells us that the neutral color rendering
is the default in Photolab 6 when using the wide gamut color space now watch what happens
when I switch to the classic or Legacy working color space the rendering now looks terrible the
image has lost a lot of contrast this may make you think that the classic color space is dreadful and
that you shouldn't use it don't make this mistake instead watch what happens if I turn off the color
rendering again the contrast and color saturation suddenly return to the image and you can also see
this reflected in the histogram what's happening is that a different color rendering is applied to
the image when we use the classic color space and figure out which one we can check the different
renderings if I switch the rendering to the neutral tonality version 2 you can see that
it improves the image but when I turn it off the image changes so we know that isn't the default I
won't bore You by showing you all the renderings instead I'll tell you that the default is the dxo
camera profile for the G9 which is the camera I shot this image with with this rendering selected
when I turn off the color rendering panel there's no change in the image based on what we've seen so
far we now know a few important things that can help to improve our color images first there are
two different working color spaces with the wide gamut space representing a wider range of colors
but we're only going to notice a difference between the two where there's an out of gamut
color don't worry I'll come back to explain this in a minute second the color rendering
intent plays a much larger part in the colors we see when editing than the working color space
third we know what the default color rendering is for each of the working color spaces these
are the color renderings that are automatically applied to the image even when the color rendering
is turned off so back to the point about colors being outer gamut if you've never heard the term
out of gamut before it refers to a color that your monitor can't display because it's outside
of its range if you want to check what these are you can turn on the monitor gamut warning
this is the small triangle at the top right of the histogram which you can click to toggle on and off
my next song it shows the warning for any colors that are out of the monitor's range if I set the
saturation and vibrance to their maximum values we can see the warning in parts of the sky
but it's not only monitors that have problems with colors being out of gamut the same idea
applies to paper when printing which is why we have this second icon but to use that we first
need to turn on the soft proofing option this allows us to check our intended output to see if
it can handle the colors in the photo if it can't we can change the colors of our image or possibly
use a different paper that can display them when I turn on the panel you can see that it's set to
check the srgb color space now I can also click the color warning indicator and because we don't
see any problems highlighted we know the image is within the srgb color space but watch what happens
if we now check it against the photo speed natural soft texture printer paper we see warnings across
the landscape so this paper probably isn't a good choice for printing this image unless
we correct the problem color areas now let's compare it with the photo speed variety paper
with that I can still see warnings but you wouldn't notice them in the final print and we
can easily fix these because they're so small let's turn off the soft proofing now because
there's something else that's often confused with the gamut warnings which are clipping warnings
you can turn the clipping warnings on and off using the icons to the bottom left of the
histogram the moon represents the shadow clipping and the Sun the Highlight clipping clipping occurs
where pixels in the image reach the maximum or minimum values when this happens to too many
pixels it can make the image look ugly when I turn on the shadow clipping you can see the warning in
a few of the pixels but when I make the blacks in the image darker we see the clipping warning
over a larger area notice that the warning color has also changed from Blue to White
blue indicated that there was the blue color Channel where white is the luminance
now let's go back to the color rendering because there's something else that you need to be aware
of remember our neutral rendering which made the image look Dreadful when we were using the classic
working color space the reason that it looked terrible was that it was compressing the tonal
range in the image which reduced the contrast but this isn't necessarily a problem especially if you
have Shadow or highlight clipping in the histogram it will actually fix those then all we have to do
is use the tone controls to fix a contrast problem and you might find that it produces more natural
results which are easier to control but you need to avoid though is then switching to use
a different rendering or color space after you've made changes which highlights another important
point you need to decide which working color space I'm rendering to use before you begin applying
your adjustments but there's something else to tell you about so let's switch to another image
so far we've been working with a raw file but this image is a dng file which I produced in Lightroom
let's select to use the classic color space with this because it has an interesting feature
it allows us to take the intensity of the profile Beyond 100 if I now switch to the wide gamma
color space you can see that that has a maximum intensity of only a hundred percent also when
we look at the available generic renderings you can see that the file also has an embedded color
rendering Lightroom embedded that when I used it to process the raw file to a dng but what I
really love about photo lab is that we don't have to use any of these generic renderings at all
instead we can use Photo Lab to simulate other cameras and films now I will point out that
I have film pack installed as well and some of these renderings come from that so you might not
see the same list that I have here now earlier we talked about soft proofing in printing and
printing in general is a very tricky subject if you've ever struggled to produce accurate prints
this video will help you thanks for watching today and I hope that you've enjoyed the video
if you have please take a moment to share it with others and I'll see you soon for another