Color Space Output. . . need help.

[gahspidy]

I never gave much thought to color space output until recently, when I started printing out some of my favorite shots in an 12x18 size and storing them. After reading about the differences between sRGB ( which is what I have been usinbg) as opposed to Adobe RGB, I was wondering if my images are perhaps "missing" some subtlties in colors and tones with the narrow color space of sRGB.
I am using Jasc Paint Shop Pro8. I also shoot with film and scan my negs on a minolta Dimage Dual lll film scanner.
I just set the color space for my monitor to AdobeRGB as well as the PSP8 application. Then I set my scanner to output Adobe RGB. however, when opening these new files scanned with AdobeRGB output setting, the color management in PSP8 says that the image is an sRGB color file. And when I put the monitor back to sRGB it appears better.
If an image is taken or scanned in sRGB, must it always be viewed with that space? I will be writing to Minolta to see what they tell me.
Is it important for someone like myself, who is not professional, but would think about perhaps one day selling some prints? My monitor is just over a year old ( Viewsonic 19") and the colors that print out from the printer are very accurate to what I see on the screen, although sometimes darker which I have to compensate for sometimes.
Another question is about 24 bit color as opposed to 48 bit. I scan at 24 bit, only because my editing program won't work on color depth greatere than that. My scanner is able to scan at 48 bit depth creating twice the file size. Am I really missing alot by not using 48 bit and would I be able to tell the difference with sRGB anyway.?

[Peter_AUS]

Gary,

sRGB is for web presentation, not for printing presentation. I would suggest using aRGB.

The colour gamut of sRGB is not as good as aRGB it is narrower. You will always get much better colours using 48bit scan over 24 bit scan over 16 bit scan over 8 bit scan. The lower the bits the less the information there. A bit like Tiff and jpeg files.

When you view photos in a web browser it is better to save them as sRGB files than aRGB as that is what the browser wants and you will see a difference in how they are viewed.

If you are going to print at large scale then scanning at the highest bit size is best, actually scanning to the print size and haveing the resolution at 300 dpi is good as well.

If you are looking at maybe a better scanning software, try http://www.hamrick.com for vuescan, seems to be a very well respected scanning software. I take it you are scanning images from the film frame ??

I'm no expert on printing, but you do need to get it right, profiling wise as well and making sure you match the ink/paper profiling as well. The number of inks you have makes a big difference as well, the more ink cartridges generally makes for better prints. Something like 7-8 cartridge printers.

Hope that helps.

[gahspidy]

Thanks for your response, Peter.
Yes, I am scanning the negatives at the highest resolution always. But I have only been using 24 bit because I cxannot work with them in 48 bit. To work with them in 48 bit, I think I would have to go out and get Adobe Photoshop and I think that program is over 5 or $600.00? which I could not justify at this time. What I think I will be doing though is scan at 48 bit, then save to CD, then work with the duplicate in 24 bit. This way, when I'm ready to work on a 48 bit file, I will have them stored. I burn all to CD anyway, but perhaps will burn them uneditied in 48 bit from now on. The only images I save on the internal hardrive are lowest compression jpegs, for there is no need for me to have tiff files on the drive taking up space.
So if I save these jpegs, which are only for use on the web, as sRGB do I have to keep changing the monitor colorspace to view the aRGB tiff when ready to print and back again to sRGb when viewing the jpegs ?