Colour Profile Calculator — Gamut Comparison

For web display, use sRGB — it matches most monitors. For print, Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB captures more colours your printer can reproduce. For iPad/Mac work, Display P3 is the native wide-gamut profile.

Colours outside the target gamut are mapped to the nearest reproducible colour. This is called gamut clipping or gamut mapping. Soft-proofing shows you the result before converting so you can adjust colours manually.

FOGRA39 (Coated FOGRA39, ICC profile from color.org) is the standard CMYK profile for coated paper printing in Europe. It defines the colours a standard offset press can reproduce on coated paper stock, and UK printers typically use it. Note: the ~30% gamut figure shown here for CMYK is an approximate area estimate only — a CMYK gamut is irregular (it extends past sRGB in cyan and yellow while falling short of saturated RGB primaries), so it cannot be reduced to a single exact CIE 1931 percentage the way RGB chromaticity triangles can.

ProPhoto RGB has the widest gamut but includes colours that are physically impossible to see. It requires 16-bit colour depth to avoid banding. Use it only if your workflow is 16-bit end-to-end and you understand colour management.

Most monitors display sRGB, which is narrower than what printers can produce (and vice versa). Calibrate your monitor, use the correct colour profile, and always soft-proof before printing.