This page provides some supplementary advice for members, submitting digital photos to club competitions, who have an advanced knowledge of digital photography and colour management.
Most people, whether they are aware of it or not, will be using, and submitting, digital files in RGB format (as opposed to CMYK or greyscale for example), in the sRGB colour space (as opposed to Adobe RGB (1998) for example).
Some advanced digital users will be using other colour spaces and/or formats. To be acceptable to the software used for the competition, these files must be converted before submission. One simple way in which this situation can arise is for the colour settings on your digital camera to be set to something other than ‘standard RGB’ or ‘sRGB’. For example, some cameras allow the user to specify ‘Adobe RGB’ (or, equivalently, ‘Adobe RGB (1998)’) as a colour space, in which case jpg files produced by the camera will be in that colour space instead of sRGB. Alternatively, if you are using RAW conversion software, the RGB files produced can be in a variety of different colour spaces.
If you already have RGB format files, but they are not in the sRGB colour space, please convert them to sRGB before submission, for example using Adobe Photoshop (version 6 or later) in the steps outlined in the next paragraph.
Depending on the version of Photoshop that you are using, conversion can be done through either the ‘Image > Mode > Convert To Profile’ dialog or the ‘Edit > Convert To Profile’ dialog. In either case, specify ‘sRGB’ as the destination space (it doesn’t matter which implementation of sRGB that you choose). The ‘Intent’ option should either be ‘Perceptual’ or ‘Relative Colorimetric’; in the latter case, you will usually find that setting the ‘Black Point Compensation’ option is beneficial. If in doubt, experiment until you are happy with the results. Then save the file in jpg format as described above.
If you have produced files that are not in RGB format, for example in one of the standard Adobe Photoshop greyscale colour spaces such as ‘Dot Gain 20%’ or ‘Gray Gamma 2.2, then versions of these files in RGB format, in the sRGB colour space, must be produced for submission to projected digital competitions. Use the steps outlined in the previous paragraph to achieve this.