Color Gamut
What Is a Color Gamut?
A color gamut is the range of colors that a device, a printing condition, or a color space can reproduce. A screen’s gamut is set by its red, green, and blue primaries, and a press’s by its inks and the paper they land on. A color that a device can’t reach is out of gamut for that device.
Gamuts are usually drawn on the CIE chromaticity diagram, a horseshoe-shaped map of the colors people can see. An RGB gamut shows up on it as a triangle with the three primaries at its corners, and a larger triangle means a wider range of colors. CE.SDK works in sRGB by default and can move to the wider Display P3 on iOS and Android devices that support it.
How Do sRGB, Display P3, Adobe RGB, and CMYK Compare?
sRGB is the baseline the others are measured against. Wide-gamut spaces reach further than sRGB, and print reaches less far, by an amount that depends on the paper.
| Where you meet it | Range vs. sRGB | |
|---|---|---|
| sRGB | The web and most screens | The baseline |
| Display P3 | Apple and other wide-gamut screens | More saturated reds and greens |
| Adobe RGB (1998) | Photography headed for print | Wider, mostly in greens and cyans |
| CMYK, coated paper | Gloss, silk, and matte finishes | Smaller, with some colors sRGB lacks |
| CMYK, uncoated paper | Uncoated stock and newsprint | Smaller still, smallest on newsprint |
How Do You Keep Colors Inside the Print Gamut?
Converting a file for print moves each out-of-gamut color to the nearest printable one, or compresses the whole range to fit, depending on the rendering intent. Either way the color changes, and these checks catch it before the job prints.
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Convert with the profile for the paper
Coated and uncoated stock have different gamuts, so use the profile your printer names for the paper.
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Soft proof before you export
Preview the file through the print profile, or turn on a gamut warning if your design tool has one.
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Make must-match colors spot colors
No conversion prints a color the inks can't make, so a brand color outside the press gamut needs its own ink.
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Check a proof on the real paper
A screen can't fully match ink on paper, so judge critical colors on a printed proof.
How Does CE.SDK Handle Color Gamut?
Every CE.SDK platform supports sRGB, CMYK, and spot colors in designs. Converting a color between them is an approximation, and because CMYK has a smaller gamut than sRGB, vivid colors can look duller after conversion. The document’s ICC profile and rendering intent decide where out-of-gamut colors land. Unless you change it, the intent is relative colorimetric, which leaves printable colors untouched.
On iOS and Android, CE.SDK can switch design colors to a 16-bit Display P3 working space on devices that support it. The color picker and the live preview then show the wider range, and image exports keep it by writing 16-bit Display P3 PNGs with an embedded ICC profile. Where P3 isn’t available, including the web and server, the engine works in sRGB.
Color Gamut in Phone Photos and Brand Printing
Wide-color phone photos
A mobile photo app turns on the P3 working space, so pictures from a modern phone camera keep their saturated reds and greens through editing and export.
Brand colors outside CMYK
A packaging template sets the brand’s signature color as a spot color, so the press prints it with its own ink instead of approximating it in CMYK.
FAQs
No. A color space defines which color each set of numbers stands for, and its gamut is everything those numbers can reach. sRGB is a color space, and the sRGB gamut is the triangle it covers on the chromaticity diagram.
A screen or color space that covers clearly more than sRGB, such as Display P3 or Adobe RGB. The extra colors only appear on a display that can reproduce them. On a standard sRGB screen they are converted and look less saturated.
No. Bit depth sets how many distinct colors fit inside a gamut, not how far the gamut reaches. Eight bits per channel gives about 16.7 million colors in any color space, and 16 bits divides the same range into much finer steps, which keeps gradients smooth. CE.SDK uses 16 bits per channel in its Display P3 working space to reduce banding.
Printing with orange, green, and violet inks on top of CMYK, also called expanded gamut or seven-color printing. The extra inks widen the press gamut enough to match about 90% of Pantone spot colors. Packaging and label printers use it to run many jobs from one fixed set of inks instead of mixing a separate spot ink for each.
Links
Documentation and references for this concept.
Related Terms
ICC Profile
A standardized file that records a device's color behavior, so colors can be translated correctly between screens, camer…
Lab Color
A device-independent color model built on three values: lightness, a green-red axis, and a blue-yellow axis. ICC profile…
CMYK
The Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Key(Black) subtractive color model used in professional print production, supported by CE.SDK so…
Spot Color
A precisely defined, pre-mixed ink color specified by a standardized color system (most commonly Pantone) used in print …
Coated vs. Uncoated Paper
The two main paper surfaces in print: coated stock seals the fibers so ink stays on top, uncoated stock absorbs it. Each…