1Your 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.

2Opening 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:

• sRGB — the smallest of the common spaces. Safe for web, but limited for rich prints.
• Adobe RGB (1998) — a wider, 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.

In practice, Adobe RGB is ideal for most artwork photography — it captures more colour than sRGB while staying simple and predictable to use.

3Editing 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 — especially when moving between devices or sending files to print.

4Sending 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.

5The 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.