Colour Space question: Which "working space" are Nik Collection tools using?

Nik Collection Nik Color Efex topics
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I’ve just been reading an excellent article explaining the concept of colour spaces: sRGB vs Adobe RGB vs ProPhoto RGB - PhotographyLife.com

Section 4 of this article (Working Space vs Output Space) talks about the importance of using the least restricting colour space in your post-processing software … which leads me to the following questions;

  • Which colour space do the Nik Collection tools use as their working space ?
  • When exporting to, say, Color Efex Pro (eg. from PhotoLab), which ICC profile am I best to use ?

Note: See related question (from PhotoLab perspective): Colour Space question: Which colour space is PhotoLab using as its “working space”?

Regards, John M

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The Nik Collection works with tiffs or jpegs, not raw files, so it uses the colourspace that has been baked into the file by the raw converter.

Since PhotoLab’s internal working colour space is limited to Adobe RGB, I’d export a 16-bit Adobe RGB tiff to Color Fx, etc.

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Thank you, @sankos - - That’s exactly the info I was looking for.

Regards, John M

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Has any work or updates/upgrades been done on the NIK software since 2019? It seems to have run aground.

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Good morning,
in case you have internet access :grimacing: try this Nik Collection 6

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I don’t think the question in the original post has been answered. Since that time, PL has introduced a larger working color space, “DxO Wide Gamut”, and the Nik Collection has been completely upgraded. However, I haven’t heard anything about what color space the apps in the Nik Collection do their work in. That would be nice to know.

The answer appears to be Adobe RGB (by inference):

But the situation is ambiguous:

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Yes, that’s an interesting question.

So I did a quick experiment with PL7.0.1_76 (Windows) set to Wide Gamut working color space, opened different files and exported them to Nik 5 Color Efex 5 and saved them without any change.

  1. raw-file with camera set to sRGB → ICC profile AdobeRGB
  2. raw-file with camera set to ARGB → ICC profile AdobeRGB
  3. tif-file in ProPhoto colour space → ICC profile AdobeRGB
  4. tif-file in sRGB colour space → ICC profile AdobeRGB

Comparing the files from # 3. I could see the loss of colour after export.
When comparing the files from # 4., there was no visible difference (export from small to wider colour space doesn’t add something magically).

So, you are right. :slight_smile:

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