Color gamuts
Color gamuts
A gamut is the range of colors that a color system can display or print. The spectrum of colors seen by the human eye is wider than the gamut available in any color model.
Among the color models used in Photoshop, L*a*b has the largest gamut, encompassing all colors in the RGB and CMYK gamuts. Typically, RGB gamuts contain the subset of these colors that can be viewed on a computer or television monitor (which emits red, green, and blue light). Therefore, some colors, such as pure cyan or pure yellow, can’t be displayed accurately on a monitor.
CMYK gamuts are smaller, consisting only of colors that can be printed using process-color inks. When colors that cannot be printed are displayed on-screen, they are referred to as out-of-gamut colors–that is, outside a CMYK gamut.
Identifying out-of-gamut colors
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- In the Info palette, an exclamation point appears next to the CMYK values whenever you move the pointer over an out-of-gamut color.
- In both the color picker and the Color palette, an alert triangle appears and the closest CMYK equivalent is displayed whenever you select an out-of-gamut color. To select the CMYK equivalent, click the triangle or the color patch.
The gamut is the range of colors that a color system can display or print. A color that can be displayed in RGB or HSB models may be out-of-gamut, and therefore unprintable, for your CMYK setting.
Photoshop automatically brings all colors into gamut when you convert an image to CMYK. But you might want to identify the out-of-gamut colors in an image or correct them manually before converting to CMYK.
In RGB mode, you can identify out-of-gamut colors in the following ways:
You can also quickly identify all out-of-gamut colors in an RGB image by using the Gamut Warning command.
Important: The gamut for an RGB or CMYK image depends on its document profile. See About color management
