Why 3D Color Gamuts Matter to Photographers

For picking out monitors and laptops you only need to learn a little bit of color management! Look at Color Management: Color Spaces.

Visualizing Color Spaces describes the kind of 3D color spaces we are looking at.

  • Device-dependent spaces are the color spaces (gamuts) of things like monitors and printers.
  • Device-independent spaces are color spaces (gamuts) like "sRGB" and "Adobe RGB".

Comparing Color Spaces is correct except it uses 2D (flat) representations of color spaces. All the color space graphs on this site are 3D. Because 2D graphs leave a lot out.

Currently monitors aspire to match "sRGB" (a standard gamut that matches a lot of displays) or "Adobe RGB 1998" (a wider gamut that is useful if you are preparing images to print on a wide gamut inkjet printer.) This is why the majority of the 3D plots on this site compare a device-dependant space (monitor) against a device-independant space (like sRGB).

Read down to Reference Spaces but don't read any farther! (unless you need to learn enough about color management to profile a printer.)

Color gamuts and photographs Explains how to view your monitor or printer's profile as a 3D plot. And why you want to do this.

Monitor gamut. The good, the bad, and the ugly All monitors are not created equal. Explains why some monitors are bad for editing photographs. Compares monitors (device-dependant spaces) against spaces like sRGB and Adobe RGB 1998 (device-independant space.)

All my color gamuts Various collections of 3D gamut plots I put together when I was investigating various color related things. Various monitors. Printer profiles when I was trying to profile a printer. Experimental 3D plots of the gamut of an image of a test set. Things like this.

How to make your own 3D gamut plots