I noticed something interesting the other day and wanted to share it with all of you.
Many of the modern SLR’s give you the choice of shooting in-camera sRGB or Adobe RGB – which one would I use?
Well it depends if you shoot raw or jpeg.
If you shoot jpeg only (god forbid 
), I highly recommend you set your camera to Adobe RGB. Its color space is a lot larger compared to sRGB (image to the left) and you can always convert your image back to sRGB later (e.g. when you want to post it on the net). So why not get the most out of your pixels?
Which brings me to the second point:
Why shoot jpeg at all? I know it’s an old discussion and I won’t go into the merits of shooting raw, however since you are reading this, you are obviously interested in retaining the largest amount of image information your camera can handle. So rather than simply shooting jpeg in Adobe RGB color space, you may as well shoot RAW.
Now here is where it gets interesting for the RAW shooters: I bet some of you were wondering whether to set the camera to sRGB or Adobe RGB?
If your answer is: It does not matter, shooting RAW format allows me to change the color space after the fact (i.e. in your raw processor) anyway. My answer is: Not exactly.
There is one merit to setting your camera to one of the two color spaces and it is the one that you would have suspected least: sRGB.
Here is the reason: Our cameras have a neat little feature called highlight warning. I prefer calling it blinkies (coined by Moose Peterson). It shows you on your display when and where a channel has blown out.
When you set your camera to sRGB color space those highlight warnings will be more sensitive to the blown out colorful highlights.
So since it does not make a difference in post, which color space you set in-camera (when shooting RAW), next time you play around with your camera, set it to sRGB and take a look at those blinkies. Amazing hey?
