Adobe RGB colour space on the A700

[johnb74]

I've just noticed an odd thing, is it a bug?
If I set my camera to sRGB, the exif data box called colour space has sRGB in it.
But if I set my camera to Adobe RGB, that exif data box is blank.
Therefore if I set Photoshop colour preferences to sRGB and open an Adobe RGB image I do not get an warning message; but I do (as I should) if I have the settings the other way round.
Worse: Gretag Macbeth software will not allow Adobe RGB images to be loaded because the colour space is not defined.
I know that Adobe images have file names with a leading underscore, but it begins to seem that I'm the only user who can read that information!

Does anyone have any thoughts about this? My own feeling (for what it's worth) is that this is a firmware error.

[David Kilpatrick]

Older KonMinolta cameras had 'Embed AdobeRGB' as an option. It seems Sony is not embedding the profile. Agreed, that can cause problems.

David

[johnb74]

Thank you, David for confirming my suspicions.

Now, how to get round it until Sony come up with a proper cure.

With jpeg images, it's easy: just write a Photoshop action to assign the Adobe RGB 1998 profile to the images. sadly, I don't know enough about writing scripts to make the process fully automatic with the leading underscore being identified in the action, but perhaps someone does.
Running the action on its own means the images have to be opened and saved, thus lowering the quality slightly, but if it's run at the end of any 'fiddling' that might be done to the images, it shouldn't do any serious harm. In any case, saving at jpeg level 12 is probably OK. Is it?

I can't see a way of assigning a profile to a RAW image, but is it necessary? My own guess is that it isn't since you can't do anything like printing with a RAW image. So as long as the action is invoked after the image has been converted to jpg or tif or whatever, all should be well.

Hope this is useful.

[David Kilpatrick]

The raw image does contain a tag - or should - which tells the converter (IDC) to use sRGB or AdobeRGB. It will not tell any other converter, except the Sony one, what to do.

JPEG Level 12 is pretty safe for repeated opening and closing, or reassigning profiles and reverting.

In my case, my defaults workspace is Europe Prepress 2. This means ARGB images without a profile are simply opened correctly, while sRGB images with a profile are stopped at opening to ask whether to convert etc. Setting Photoshop Elements to 'Advanced' prefs has the same effect as setting Photoshop to Europe or USA Pre-Press.

David