A Digital Color’s Journey

Let’s say you were looking at a sunset with your eyeballs. You loved all the shades of orange that were happening. So orange! You took a photo with your modern digital camera.

Later, you get the photo off your digital camera on your computer. You like post-processing your photos, so you used Adobe Lightroom to clean it up.

Then you were working on a presentation in Keynote, and a sunset photo would work great. You only really need part of it, so you take a screenshot of the part you need. You drag the screenshot onto the Keynote slide.

Now you’re doing that presentation. Your laptop is plugged into a projector, via HDMI that is connected via a USB-C dongle. The projector is now showing your sunset photo on a giant screen in an auditorium.

How did we do? Did the colors make it?

• Does the format you save directly on the camera affect it? Like RAW vs JPG or whatever?
• When you pull the photo off the camera, is there any chance of loss then? Like what cable you use or what software you use to extract them?
• When you open the photo in software, Lightroom in the example, are you forcing a new color profile or anything weird? What if it was Photoshop? or Preview?
• Does the computer operating system itself have any affect?
• When edits are saved, are you preserving the color space (or whatever)?

(My interest in this stems from the idea that we can use P3 color space on the web now in CSS, and that my monitor supports those colors, which can be more vibrant than colors in sRGB. As far as I know, image formats like JPG (and all the rest??) also support P3 colors, which is partially why my original sunset photo looks so good. So… Have we preserved those vibrant colors OK so far? Or have any of these actions affected the file such that the colors are now in a more constrained color space?)

• When you take that screenshot of part of the photo, that’s creating any entirely new image file, which feels like a risky moment. Are you losing any color information there?
• When you put the file into Keynote, does Keynote have any limitations or do anything to those colors? When I project, is it sending/showing the full color information from that photo, or does it somehow get flattened/composited? It feels like because of things like slide transitions, Keynote might be extra-involved in the final rendered output.
• I feel like if my extra vibrant sunset colors have made it this far, the most likely culprit for ruining them is the overhead projector itself. I hear that some of them support “HDR color” (which is also how I think of P3) but that none of them do it “well”.
• Even if the vibrant colors technologically make it to the screen, don’t things like the brightness of the screen and the lighting in the room and all that make a big difference? The last mile, as it were.

It almost feels like there are so many potential color transformations here it’s a miracle orange is even still orange, let alone exactly as vibrant as an orange as the original capture. If my goal is to preserve as much vibrancy as I can, what are the most dangerous parts of all this I should avoid doing?