Technical Tips

Product photography colour management

RGB (red, green & blue) or CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow & black) colour spaces are one of the things which determine how accurite an images colours appear on a monitor screen or in print.

We supply as standard all our images with an RGB (red, green & blue) colour space as this is what is required by any device with a screen, such as a monitor or smartphone to display an image.

The colour space is determined by the image profile that is embedded into an image file to tell a device how to display its colours. There are many colour profiles available but only two RGB profiles which are widely used and it’s unlikely you will ever require anything else for general use.

sRGB - is the most widely used profile for image web site display.
adobe1998 - this is a common print profile allowing a wider range of colours to be printed.

However, CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow & black) are the main ink colours used in nearly all print processes. If you are going to print your product photography and packshots you will need to have your RGB images converted to a CMYK colour space at some point.

If you only intend to print your images on a standard desk top printer you don't need to do anything to the RGB images, as the printer's internal software will do it for you on the fly. But obtaining accurate colour in commercial print such as offset litho can be difficult so if your not familiar with CMYK conversion, we would recommend supplying your designer or print company with normal RGB profiled images as in many cases they will likely be in a better position to accurately convert RGB images to the appropriate CMYK colour space for you.