This article is copyright © 2006 CJ Morgan and is published with the permission of the author.

The material first appeared as a post on the Yahoo 10D Forum. It is an entertaining analogy about Colour Management that rivals Steve Upton's The Color of Toast.

The Question
Why do we use sRGB IEC61966-2.1 or ProPhoto or Adobe RGB (1998) to adjust our images when we do not print in that profile?

The 12" Pizza Answer
For the same reason we don't make a 12-inch pizza on a 12-inch table — things have a greater tendency to fall off during preparations.

Now with a pizza, you work with a bigger table to that you can comfortably layout all your ingredients around you as you're preparing the pizza. But even if your table was just 24 inches round, certain ingredients and bowls and stuff might fall off the edge of the table because your working room is so small.

In a like manner, when you're mucking around with your images (in Photoshop or whatever), it's useful to have the largest working space you can afford just so that when you make adjustments to the image, you don't clip colors (the photographic version of things falling off a table).

Now when your 12-inch pizza is finished, THEN you might be able to put it on a 12-inch table or serving plate and be okay.

In like manner, AFTER you've done all your image work (in Photoshop or whatever) then if you need to convert it to a smaller working space (because perhaps that's all your printer can accommodate) then that's the time to do it.

But you'll want to keep your original finished image in the largest working space anyway to store in your archives just in case at some later date you want to print it again and find yourself in a situation with a printer that can handle that larger working space: the 18-inch pizza!

7 August 2009, originally published 2006