<sect2 id="editor-cm-srgb">
    <title>The sRGB color space</title>

    <sect3>
        <title>What is so special about the sRGB color space?</title>

        <para>
            sRGB is widely accepted as a standard color profile by virtually everyone involved with consumer-oriented imaging. sRGB was proposed in 1996 by Hewlett Packard and Microsoft as a standardized color space for consumer-oriented applications. As stated in the initial HP/MS proposal:

            <blockquote><para>
                Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft propose the addition of support for a standard color space, sRGB, within the Microsoft operating systems, HP products, the Internet, and all other interested vendors. The aim of this color space is to complement the current color management strategies by enabling a third method of handling color in the operating systems, device drivers and the Internet that utilizes a simple and robust device independent color definition. This will provide good quality and backward compatibility with minimum transmission and system overhead. Based on a calibrated colorimetric RGB color space well suited to Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) monitors, television, scanners, digital cameras, and printing systems, such a space can be supported with minimum cost to software and hardware vendors...
            </para></blockquote>

            <blockquote><para>
                Currently, the ICC [International Color Consortium]... tracks and ensures that a color is correctly mapped from the input to the output color space... by attaching a profile for the input color space to the image in question. This is appropriate for high end users. However, there are a broad range of users that do not require this level of flexibility and control. Additionally, most existing file formats do not, and may never support color profile embedding, and finally, there are a broad range of uses [that] actually discourage people from appending any extra data to their files. A common standard RGB color space addresses these issues ... by merging the many standard and non-standard RGB monitor spaces into a single standard RGB color space. Such a standard could dramatically improve the color fidelity in the desktop environment. For example, if operating system vendors provide support for a standard RGB color space, the input and output device vendors that support this standard color space could easily and confidently communicate color without further color management overhead in the most common situations. (<ulink url="http://www.w3.org/Graphics/Color/sRGB">archived copy</ulink>)
            </para></blockquote>

            To summarize, the point of the by-now almost universally adopted sRGB color space was and is to make life easier for consumers (no need to worry about color management), less expensive for manufacturers (no need to worry about compatibility between consumer-level digital cameras or scanners,  monitors, printers, and so forth), and more convenient for displaying images on the Internet (don't worry about embedding and reading icc profiles - just assume sRGB).
        </para>

        <para>
            <emphasis>So if sRGB works so well and makes life so easy for everyone, why use any other color space and thus be forced to worry about color management issues?</emphasis>
        </para>

        <para>
            sRGB was designed to contain colors easily displayed on consumer-oriented monitors and printed by consumer-oriented printers manufactured in 1996. This least-common-denominator set of viewable and printable colors - the technical term is "color gamut" - is much smaller than the set of colors we can see in the real world, much smaller than the set of colors today's digital cameras can capture, much smaller than the set of colors today's printers can print, and much smaller than the color gamut of the new wide gamut monitors that are beginning to enter the consumer market. For anyone who wants to make use of the wider color gamuts available today even at the consumer level, the gamut of sRGB is too small. Conversely, if you don't intend to make use of an expanded gamut of colors at any point in your digital imaging workflow, then you don't need to worry about non-sRGB color spaces and all the attending intricacies of color management.
        </para>

    </sect3>

    <sect3>
        <title>How small is sRGB?</title> 

        <para>
            A visual representation of the limitations of sRGB compared to the colors we actually see in the real world is presented here after. It shows a two-dimensional representation of all the colors we can see (the horseshoe-shaped region) and the colors contained in the sRGB space (the smaller triangular region).
        </para>

        <para>
            <screenshot>
                <screeninfo></screeninfo>
                <mediaobject>
                    <imageobject>
                        <imagedata fileref="&path;editor-cm-542px-CIExy1931-sRGB.png" format="PNG"/>
                    </imageobject>
                    <textobject>
                    <phrase></phrase>
                    </textobject>
                </mediaobject>
            </screenshot>
        </para>

        <para>
            If you would like to see a two-dimensional representation of sRGB compared to some of the larger working color spaces, see Bruce Lindbloom's excellent <ulink url="http://www.brucelindbloom.com/">site</ulink>, click on "Info" then on "Information About RGB Working Spaces".
        </para>

    </sect3>

</sect2>

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