Raymond Maxwell Interview On Luminous Landscape

I've already commented on the interview with Jay Maisel, but another interview on issue # 17 of the Luminous Landscape Video Journal is with Raymond Maxwell, a colour expert. He nicely explains the difference between perceptual and relative colorometric rendering. Perceptual compacts the whole colour gamut to fit within the colour space of your output device (printer) while relatice colorometric simply flattens the colour range beyond the maximum gamut of your output device to the limit of the device.

He further talked about colour spaces and addressed whether one should be using Profoto Colour Space or Adobe RGB 98, the previous standard. He points out that the vast majority of images don't get near the limits of even Adobe RGB 98, especially landscapes and that if you use a much wider colour space, you have to divide that space up into the same number of chunks as you would divide the smaller space into, and thus images using the bigger space have bigger chunks, more distance between steps and coarser gradation of colour, which can on occasion be a problem.

He suggested that if you have a purely 16 bit workflow, then it might not be a problem, though as currently all Epson printers use 8 bit, perhaps this means we should be thinking about going back. Problem is, for that occasion when Adobe RGB isn't as wide as the colour we have and the ability of the printer to make it, we're screwed. It sounded like hadn't convinced Michael to switch back.

I'm still using my Canon 5000 with the 16 bit driver, so perhaps I can continue to work in ignorant bliss. Perhaps this is more theory than practice and not to be noticed by us mere mortals. Time will tell. I suggest you watch the video.