[MW Forums]

Canadian developer The BabelColor Company has released the second version of its BabelColor application, which compares and converts RGB color spaces for artists, designers, photographers, scientists and anyone else whose work requires accurate RGB color representations. This upgrade includes six new RGB color spaces -- BestRGB, Beta RGB, DonRGB4, eciRGB, Ekta Space PS5 and ProPhoto -- as well as two color spaces, Munsell HVC and LCh*, changed preferences that remain when the software is quit and restarted and a Color Deck viewing mode that users can employ to browse and convert colors from and to color chip catalogs. more

[Tau_Myx]

I understand why you might have other color spaces like LAB and CMYK, but why so many variations on RGB? How can you have so many different ways of doing the same thing? I mean it's just 0=black, 128=mid grey, and 256=white, right?
Sometimes I think they just deliberately make things complicated to sell more gadgets.

[TheBoyKen]

My thoughts exactly, I know Cocoa's NSBitmapImageRep uses floats instead of chars for each channel (btw 255 not 256 = white but you knew that really), but that still isn't a colourspace as such, just a way of storing something.
Puzzled,
Ken

[CarlStawicki]

In reply to:

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I mean it's just 0=black, 128=mid grey, and 256=white, right?

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Different RGB spaces have different gammas, white points, primaries, and color gamuts. Because of all these factors, a 128 gray (for instance) in one space will not be the same color as in another space. In additions to the various working spaces (AdobeRGB, sRGB, etc...), you also have as many RGB spaces as you have scanners, digicams, monitors, RGB printers, etc...

[DonC]

In reply to:

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I understand why you might have other color spaces like LAB and CMYK, but why so many variations on RGB? How can you have so many different ways of doing the same thing? I mean it's just 0=black, 128=mid grey, and 256=white, right?
Sometimes I think they just deliberately make things complicated to sell more gadgets.

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Look at your monitor. Turn down the brightness control. Did the color change ? Definitivly it changed. You heve your monitor set up to your needs. An other person likes to have it at different settings. The software uses the same values, but the perception of the color on the display is different.
Go to a tech shop and look at their TV wall. Do all TV sets show the same color ? Some have nicer colors than others.
For professional color production you need to gain control over these differences. Depending on your application (as an artist, as a photographer, as a printer etc) you have different workflows and different needs. So you will use different reference color spaces for your work.
If you want to know more about this, have a look at Apple's ColorSync homepage for more details. But be warned: it is science.
http://www.apple.com...ures/colorsync/ Download that PDF file on the right side.
http://www.apple.com...ning/colorsync/

[moose_n_squirrel]

In reply to:

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I understand why you might have other color spaces like LAB and CMYK, but why so many variations on RGB? How can you have so many different ways of doing the same thing? I mean it's just 0=black, 128=mid grey, and 256=white, right?

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Ha, for one thing you're assuming RGB only exists in 8 bits, for another you're assuming if you feed the same numbers to any device they will always look the same.
Why not try out this article.
Exploring Wide Open Color Spaces