Nature Images journal
sRGB is not the limitation people think it is
Wider gamuts look better in an editor and worse everywhere else. When that trade is worth making, and when it is not.
Every so often someone asks why files here are delivered in sRGB rather than Adobe RGB or ProPhoto, usually with the implication that sRGB is a compromise.
It is a compromise. It is also the right one for a delivered file, and it costs less than people assume.
What a wider gamut buys you
Real headroom in exactly two places: saturated reds and oranges, and saturated cyans. In photographic subjects that means sunsets, some flowers, and tropical water.
For everything else - foliage, rock, sand, sky, snow, skin, weathered wood - the colours in the scene sit comfortably inside sRGB and the wider space is holding nothing.
Nature photography spends most of its time in the second category, which is why this matters less here than in, say, product photography of saturated packaging.
What it costs you
Every browser, phone and social platform assumes sRGB when a file arrives without a profile, and a great deal of software silently ignores profiles that are present.
A file delivered in Adobe RGB and handled by any of that software has its numbers interpreted as sRGB, which desaturates the image visibly. The wider gamut does not merely fail to help; it actively produces a worse result in the most common path.
That asymmetry is the whole argument. sRGB handled badly looks correct. Adobe RGB handled badly looks wrong.
Where a wider space genuinely belongs
In your working file, not in the delivery.
If you are making large tonal or colour moves, work in a wide space at 16 bits, do everything there, and convert to sRGB as the last step for web delivery or to CMYK for print. That gives you all the editing headroom and none of the delivery risk.
Converting on import and editing in sRGB throughout is the actual mistake, and it is a different mistake from delivering in sRGB.
The sunset case
The one place you will feel it. A saturated horizon at sunrise can exceed sRGB, and the published grade here deliberately errs toward preserving separation in the gradient rather than maximising saturation.
That is a choice with a reason: a clipped sky cannot be recovered and a slightly restrained one can be pushed. The headroom is left for you.
Print gamut is smaller than sRGB in most directions and larger in a couple. Converting sRGB to CMYK loses very little that a wider source would have preserved, because the destination is the constraint, not the source.