scRGB Color Space

Mark Goldstein | News | July 28, 2006 | 7 Comments |

Subscribers to Tim Grey’s Digital Darkroom Questions e-mail list will have learnt today that Microsoft is set to introduce a brand new colour space in the Windows Vista OS. Called scRGB, it will extend the existing sRGB space and offer a larger gamut and larger dynamic range. Tim Grey comments that “It was specifically designed to provide benefits to high-end users such as graphic arts, professional digital photography, computer games, and more.”. Here’s an extract from the official specification:

“The IEC 61966-2-2 (scRGB) color space is designed to complement current color management strategies—such as International Color Consortium (ICC), CMYK, and sRGB—by enabling a method of handling color in the operating systems, device drivers and the Internet that utilizes a simple and robust equipment independent color definition. This will provide good quality, large color gamut, and large bit precision and extended tonal range. Based on IEC 61966-2-1 (sRGB), this color space is well suited for graphics arts RGB workflows, professional digital photography, computer gamuts and computer graphics.”

This new announcement follows hard on the heels of the Windows Media Photo Format that was unveiled recently.

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7 Comments so far | Newest Oldest first | Post a comment

#1 Gordon McKinney

Yet another color space to confuse things. sRGB works just fine. Even labs only handle sRGB.

For the aRGB and larger 16bit color spaces users; they already have their solution pegged.

So why add another color space?

4:21 pm - Friday, July 28, 2006

#2 Rob

There is only one answer to this: MS and Gates know that their death grip on computer world is loosing its strength and they are trying desperately to find new ways to delay the unavoidable moment when people will have too many choices (People switching to Mac OS X and running Windows on Macs only as a way of retaining the "comfort blanket", Open Source, ever growing popularity of Linux in the business world, etc.).

They are used to monopolizing the market - that's what they were always doing and that's what they were always best at.

And BTW, it's no surprise to me that Mr. Gates decided to retire soon - the situation gets too hot to handle by the month...

7:18 am - Saturday, July 29, 2006

#3 Bruce McL

Where can I download scRGB? I can't find a place to do so on the Internet. Perhaps it doesn't quite exist yet. That would be convenient for Microsoft; they can make all sorts of claims about scRGB and no one can refute them. Has anybody written anything meaningful comparing this new proposed color profile with ProPhoto RGB?
I agree that Microsoft is not trying to help anyone here, particularly photographers. What they are trying to do is help themselves to the contents of everyone's wallets.

5:40 pm - Saturday, July 29, 2006

#4 Lars

scRGB has been available for years, this is no news.

5:40 pm - Monday, July 31, 2006

#5 frank

Kind of silly, don't you think? It seems to be between sRGB and Adobe RGB, and Lars indicates that it alreasy exists, and other comments indicate that it has few, if any, adopters. sRGB is beyond what the WEB can display, and most output devices (printers and monitors) are limited to close to sRGB anyway. Amything to grab a headline. How can this give a hotographer a competitive advantage? Just go away, Microsoft, and take scRGB and your new file format with you.

11:24 am - Tuesday, August 1, 2006

#6 Mark Goldstein

scRGB may have been available for a while, but Microsoft now seems to be pushing it harder via Vista.

12:53 pm - Tuesday, August 1, 2006

#7 Lars

scRGB is an extremely wide color space (most of the space is not actual real colors). This in turn requires a much higher resolution - 8 bits per channel just won't cut it, and 16-bits might not be enough for editing, possibly 32-bit integer or floating point is necessary for accurate image manipulation. So while the IEC standard for scRGB was published early 2003, today's hardware and software (read: Photoshop, as well as Windows and MacOS) cannot handle such a wide color space. MS is just looking very far ahead and is hoping to eventually get a wide adoption for scRGB. Whether that will be successful is of course the real question. It certainly would be nice if MS could provide an imaging library in line with that ambition - GDI+ is useless if you want to go beyond 8 bpp in developing imaging apps.

2:56 pm - Tuesday, August 1, 2006