In article ,
me wrote:

On Tue, 29 Dec 2009 09:45:48 -0800, isw wrote:


I'm OP, and I agree with what you've said, now that I finally understand
it. Now, the remaining question is, what is the preferred profile to
change to?

Considering that there will certainly be improvements in the gamut
capabilities of display devices in the future, I'm thinking that sRGB is
probably too constraining. How about ProPhoto?


First, what matters is the content of your images, not necessarily
what colorspace they are in. Even though the scanners color space may
be larger than sRGB or AdobeRGB, what matters is the actual colors
contained.

It is my understanding (which may be incorrect), that when an image is
"matched" to a different profile, the values of the pixels are
"corrected" to agree with the new profile. If that is so, then once an
image is "matched" to a low-gamut profile like sRGB, then it's not
possible to recover the lost information, even in theory.

Can iPhoto show out of gamut colors? You could then see
what colors are contained/maintained in a given color space.

I don't think so. But that's not the issue. I don't care whether iPhoto
(or any other specific image handling app) can display the full gamut of
the images; what I want is to not lose something that might be usable on
*future* imaging equipment, whether a better screen, or a printer, or
whatever.

You also
haven't mentioned what format you are saving in. A wider color space
may bring about issues given the wider space must fit into a given
amount of storage bits and hence there may be less graduations of a
given color available.

Saving as "high quality" JPEGs; these are 35mm slides, scanned at 4800
ppi on a scanner that *claimed* to be able to handle it. But there's
nothing about the JPEG encoding process that forces a restricted gamut.
Storage space is not an issue, but I need to deal with iPhoto's problem
with the scanner's profile, and I don't want to throw anything away in
the process.

Isaac