🎨 Understanding Colour Profiles
A simple guide for artists photographing their own work
Getting the colours of your artwork to look the same from camera to screen to print can feel mysterious — but it all comes down to colour profiles. Here’s what they are and how they work, in plain English.
1️⃣ Your camera captures the image
Every camera (and phone) “sees” colour in its own way. If you shoot in RAW, the file simply stores what the sensor saw — it doesn’t yet know what “red” or “blue” really means. If you shoot in JPEG, your camera adds a small tag called a colour profile (usually sRGB or Display P3 on iPhones) so other devices know how to display the colours correctly.
2️⃣ Opening the photo on your computer
When you open a RAW file in Photoshop or Lightroom, the software has to develop it — a bit like bringing a negative to life. At this stage, it turns the raw data into real colours inside a chosen colour space, such as:
- Adobe RGB (1998) — a wide, reliable option that gives excellent colour range for printing. (Recommended for most artists.)
- ProPhoto RGB — an even wider space sometimes used by professional retouchers who need the very finest colour control, but not essential for most artists.
In practice, Adobe RGB is ideal for almost all artwork photography — it captures more colour than sRGB while staying simple and predictable to use.
3️⃣ Editing and saving your image
When you’ve finished editing, always save your image with the colour profile embedded. That little tag travels with your file and tells every screen and printer, “These colours belong to Adobe RGB” (or sRGB, or ProPhoto RGB). Without that tag, colours can shift and lose accuracy.
4️⃣ Sending your file for Giclée printing
When you send us your file, we read the embedded profile so we know exactly how your colours were defined. That’s how we make sure what you created on screen is translated faithfully for print.
5️⃣ The printer’s own colour profile
Each of our printers, inks, and papers has its own unique ICC profile — a kind of fingerprint that tells us precisely how colours behave on that material. We use that printer/paper profile to convert your image’s colour space into the exact instructions our printers understand. This ensures the blues, greens, and subtle tones in your artwork print as beautifully as possible on your chosen paper.
🎯 The only parts you need to think about
- Shoot RAW if you can (or Adobe RGB JPEG if not).
- Edit in Adobe RGB. ProPhoto RGB is optional and only helpful if you know you need the extra range.
- Always embed the colour profile when saving your image.
- Send the file to us as it is — we’ll handle the printer and paper profiles.