"Why would we use Wide Gamut Color Space when we have sRGB monitors and export mostly in jpeg for screen view? "
DXO team on their website has written about this a lot, but the short answer is that sRGB is outdated old sadly still a standard for universally supported color space that is supposed to provide a standardized way of showing color on monitors of its day. Eventually digital displays, from smartphones to desktop monitors to tablets could display wider gamut colors and so can many printers. Adobe RGB 1998 was an attempt to provide a wider gamut color space in order to accommodate for this discrepancy and to be used as working color space as well. ProPhoto RGB was intended to be an archival color space. Since most cameras can capture very wide gamut of colors, and you might want to preserve that ProPhoto RGB was archival space, but some raw processors like Adobe adopted a flavor of it for the raw processing.
DXO used either Adobe RGB which was sometimes too small, or they could go with ProPhotoRGB to accommodate for all colors in a working color space. But such a crazy color space like ProPhoto RGB is not actually ideal for working color space, since it’s easy to work with in it and change colors that your monitor, your eye and no printer can display. Because some of the colors are even beyond color humans can see, because it’s all represented by math.
DXO Wide Gamut Color Space is updated Adobe RGB with more clever solutions. Its wider than Adobe RGB hence solving the problem of a situation where some colors don’t fit with AdobeRGB limitations, but yet it’s not so wide like ProPhotoRGB so that you can easily screw up colors that you can change but cannot possibly see. DXO’s solution was intelligent compromise of just wide enough color space that fits all the important colors one can see and display, but keeping it small enough to minimize the problematic color correction operations.
DXO Wide Gamut Color space is similar to what Davinci from BlackMagic tried to do with their solution to the same problem. Davinci Wide Gamut working color space.
It’s important to remember that DXO’s Wide Gamut Color space is a working color space, not a delivery one. Technically, you could make one to use in an image, but it’s not meant for that. It’s meant to be used in DXO PhotoLab as a working color space, and then export in desired color space for other needs. This is where the embedded color space like sRGB becomes important. But since sRGB is smaller in gamut than DXO wide gamut, another clever but often overlooked addition to workflow is soft proofing panel and preserve color details slider and check box for export.
When you go from working wider gamut space to narrow output space like sRGB you might lose some colors. It’s unavoidable. The question is how do you make the compromise between destaturated colors and those that have more tonal quality, the details the textures.
Relative colorimetric and perceptual, etc. are old school algorithms that try to either cut off out of gamut colors leaving that part of the image less saturated but also with no details. Or the try to proportionally bring all the wider gamut into smaller gamut space, giving you the details and less saturation, buts a crude way to mess up even the colors that were inside the desired output gamut. Again DXO innovated and provided us with another best practice. Their protected color details feature, de saturates just the colors out of the gamut, but not others and keeps the details in the area of high saturated, it does not simply cut it off. You can try to simply desturate or do something complex with masking, but all that is done accurately, easy and automatically by DXO.
DXO innovation and implementation are the best on the market right now, for something that was a problem for decades and got no love from other companies.
Many years ago I made some tutorials explaining these problems.
Color Management “Lost Tapes” Part 5 – Introduction to color spaces
Color Management “Lost Tapes” Part 6 – RGB Working Spaces in ColorThink Pro
Color Management “Lost Tapes” Part 7 – RGB Working Spaces and monitor in ColorThink Pro
Color Management “Lost Tapes” Part 8 – RGB Working Spaces and Output Spaces in ColorThink Pro
