pkfilms: color space adobe and srgb

I visit numerous sites and blogs to learn about gear and settings on DSLR's and one thing I've never seen or noticed until recently is what color space to set your Canon DSLR to. I've always used the set color space on my cameras SRGB. Shane Hurlbut on his site http://www.hurlbutvisuals.com/ talks step by step on how to set up your Canon DSLR and color spaces. I found it interesting that he mentioned that he uses the Adobe RGB color space. So I decided to test both color spaces to see what I could come up with.

I shot with my t3i, Zeiss 50mm set at 1.4. On one card I shot on Adobe color space and the other card on SRGB color space. Picture profiles used were neutral 0,-4,-2,0, Flaat 10n 0,-4,-2,0, flaat 10p 0,-4,-2,0, portrait 0,-4,-2,0 and on a few I set everything to 0 except adjust skin tone one click to red.

When editing, I start out in Vegas Pro11 and grade in Magicbullet Looks2 and noticed either something wasn't working in either both or one of the softwares. In Looks 2 my normal grading, which is adjusting the curves, adding contrast and the 3 wheel corrector, none of the adjustments were doing what they usually do. All the adjustments were just washing out the image, also the scopes and waveforms weren't working so I had nothing to go by to tell what was actually being done to the footage. When I clicked back in Vegas the image was totally different from what Looks was showing and far from ideal. Usually the adjustments made in Looks2 carry over into Vegas smoothly and accurately. So I had to make small adjustments in Looks and see what was being done in Vegas, this took a while to grade the footage. I got the footage close to where it needed to be as far as finding true skintones but it would of went a lot faster with the aids of the scopes and waveform.

Even though the grading was done by eye and clicking back and forth to each program I will have to say the Adobe colorspace on all the picture profiles look nicer both in skintones and overall color. I will now be using the Adobe color space for all my shoots. As far as picture profiles I'm stuck between neutral and the Flaat 10p profiles, they both produce really natural and pleasing skintones and colors.

Once I figure out what's going on with the editing software I will reshoot the footage and grade properly to get a better examples of each.

Here's an example of what was going on in looks2 and Vegas two same grade but two different images