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Colour & Colour Management

Gamut

The complete range of colours a device, medium or colour space can produce or record.

In depth

Every stage of the chain has its own gamut, and the final image is limited by the smallest one it passes through. Gamuts are three-dimensional volumes rather than flat areas, so a printer can exceed a monitor in some saturated yellows while falling far short in blues — which is why simple percentage comparisons are misleading.

Examples in practice

A saturated cyan swimming pool sits inside the camera's gamut, inside Adobe RGB, but outside what an inkjet printer can reproduce.