Color Modes

Grayscale

This is your “black and white” mode. It has 256 shades of grey. The advantage of using this mode is a small file size. It is preferred though, that for high-end grayscale work you use RGB. Many inkjet printers work better in RGB mode and are able to render more subtle values of value and tone such as warm or cold casts to your print.

RGB

Red Green Blue. This mode is the natural color space of the computer and is best for any images that will be viewed on a computer. It is also the standard for fine-art Photographic printing. All Epson inkjet printers including our Epson 9600 printer are designed to work with RGB. Lightjet, another high-end photographic printer (which we don’t have) is also designed for RGB.

CMYK

Stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. This is the standard for printed material such as magazines, advertisements etc. Current trends in fine-art Photographic printing however are moving away from this standard.

LAB

‘L’ is the lightness, or Luminance component. The ‘A’ channel handles colors from Green and Red while the B channel contains colors from Blue to yellow. Lab color is device independent meaning it describes perceptually what a color Looks like under a rigid set of conditions. Use this mode only if it is part of your color management workflow. If your not sure, then you probably shouldn’t use it.

Indexed:

Is an 8 bit color mode with 256 possible colors it is used in some web images to keep the file size small.