Adobe RGB, because it's the default setting in Lightroom when I use it.

If you really care about color, and how it may look when printed you should use Adobe RGB. Of course you also need to calibrate your monitor so you know the colors you're looking at are what will be printed once you convert everything to CMYK for printing. Add on top of that the importance of knowing what profile your printer uses, it's all intertwined. Isn't too important if you're not printing for commercial use, or want to sell prints. If you do, calibrate your monitor, use Adobe RGB, and pay attention to what type of profile the print output uses.

yup, what he said. You either know what youre doing or just stick to sRGB. It sounds terrible I know, but if its just for web posting, just use sRGB

Adobe rgb has a wider gamut of color and its all around better but everything needs to be calibrated for it. Your monitor might support Adobe rgb but is it set to Adobe rgb? And then there's calibration...color calibration, gamma calibration, you name it. even if you're printing now and then sRGB will work fine. there are a couple of pros out there that have no problem using sRGB and making a profit.

Working with color spaces and color gamut is a bit more complicated than it first seems. Some of it (depending on the operating system you are using) is handled behind the scenes, for instance, when you print (conversion from Adobe RGB to the printer profile). Also, depending on the web browser you are using, trying to put an AdobeRGB image on the web will result in horribly flat, and lacking contrast images when viewed in the browser. For instance, Firefox and IE used to ignore the color space when displaying images, while Safari did not. I believe that the latest versions of most browsers do display proper color space now, but I don't really know.

It is best to think of using AdobeRGB or any other wide-gamut color space as a working space only. In other words, for in-camera and working with RAW, but the final output is always best in sRGB. A proper conversion will retain the proper look you are after, without sacrificing the snap you are after. Printers--at least not most consumer ones--cannot really handle AdobeRGB, and should be doing the conversions behind the scenes, but if they don't, you end up with an ugly print.

I'll be honest, I used to use wide-gamut color spaces (especially when shooting with my Canon D30), but I have moved to keeping my jpeg files in sRGB, and my work flow got a lot simpler, without any visible degradation of image quality. Oly's jpegs are simply stunning in and of themselves, without mucking with color gamut! ;-)

-Jon

This is quite an interesting article from Ken Rockwell that I found when I originally got my camera and wanted to know the difference.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/adobe-rgb.htm

The problem with that LL article is that he points to the problems of a wide-gamut color space, but doesn't really seem to grasp what he's telling us. You can't see the colors, so they don't help in the end. What you can't see, you can't adjust. Worse, you make changes you can't see, and when you do finally drop the file to sRGB, you may end up with results you weren't expecting. I used ProPhoto colorspace in my Canon RAW processing for years, based on this article, and frequently had to fight with this issue. When I bought Oly, and discovered that my jpegs out of camera were not only better than the Canon RAW, they were better than my Oly RAW. I dropped out of AdobeRGB (which I started using to process my Oly RAW images), and haven't looked back.

What people don't realize is that while the gamut is compressed, it doesn't "clip" like this article claims (which implies distortion and artifacts), but rather compresses or drops what can't be reproduced, but does so in a way that is not at all unpleasant. I have reserved myself the right to use wide-gamut for problematic files, ;-) but I haven't needed it yet.

-Jon

Why would you start at adobe rgb and then drop the file to sRGB?

It's the same thing with 16 bit vs. 8 bit color depth. You can work on your computer in 16 bit mode, but when it comes to the final file, you will have to convert to 8 bit to share with others. Use the 16 bit to get the most out of the picture you can while you can, and only convert to 8 bit at the end. With color gamut, you work with the wide space while you can, and only convert down when you must.

You can't send a file to a printer, nor post on the internet in any color space besides sRGB and trust it to come out like you want. For that matter, you probably can't send via email. Also, since all your desktop, ink jet printers also are expecting sRGB files, you are more likely to get what you expect if you convert to sRGB before printing.

Or, like I ended up doing, just ignore the wide-gamut spaces and work in sRGB. ;-) (honestly, I got tired of the extra steps in the work flow.) (Ironically, I never read Ken Rockwell's article, but his sentiments--frightfully enough--agree with mine)

-Jon

every epson large format printer Ive owned has the adobe rgb option, but I admit, not every one has or needs one. What I do to post on the web and keep the 16 bit is save the files as PNGs.

At one point I was going to add the word "consumer" to my post wrt printers, but I didn't... ;-) But yes, at issue is the average home printer, that the average person uses, not the large-format, pro printers (which, btw, use a CMYK color space to print, by virtue of the nature of printing)

-Jon

Yeah you're rigth, its a rare thing for a home printer to accept adobe rgb.

As I understand it,
The newer Kodak home printers accept Adobe RGB....

Cool, those aren't that expensive!

Yeah. That's news to me too... Too bad I can't find Kodak printers here in Poland. Isn't it Kodak that is also trying to reduce the price of carts?

-Jon

Every printer that has more cartridges than the basic CMYK can print in at least 12bit colour which means they can print the extra Red and Blue in an Adobe 1998 colour space. It's a long time ago that printers were limited to the 8bit depth of Jpegs and sRGB. Most made in the last 3 or 4 years can print 14bit and your DSLR can record this level of detail.

Unles you have a 16bit monitor you can't see the extra gamut on screen, but you can print it along with the extra sublety you get in normal tones which also extends to the greater accuracy of data in the Luminance too resulting from the greater bit depth. Sending sRGB files to most modern printers is reducing the accuracy and limiting the gamut of your images.

There's the newer Pro Photo standard which is 16bits wide and can reproduce all the colours and tones your eye can see (and then some).

Chris