Usage
As the recommended color space for the Internet, sRGB should be used for editing and saving all images intended for publication to the World Wide Web.
Due to the standardization of sRGB on the Internet, on computers, and on printers, many low- to medium-end consumer digital cameras and scanners use sRGB as the default (or only available) working color space. As the sRGB gamut meets or exceeds the gamut of a low-end inkjet printer, an sRGB image is often regarded as satisfactory for home use. However, consumer-level CCDs are typically uncalibrated, meaning that even though the image is being labeled as sRGB, one can't conclude that the image is color-accurate sRGB.
If the color space of an image is unknown and it is an 8- to 16-bit image format, assuming it is in the sRGB color space is a safe choice. This allows a program to identify a color space for all images, which may be much easier and more reliable than trying to track the "unknown" color space. An ICC profile may be used; the ICC distributes three such profiles: a profile conforming to version 4 of the ICC specification, which they recommend, and two profiles conforming to version 2, which is still commonly used.
Images intended for professional printing via a fully color-managed workflow, e.g. prepress output, sometimes use another color space such as Adobe RGB (1998), which allows for a wider gamut. If such images are to be used on the Internet they may be converted to sRGB using color management tools that are usually included with software that works in these other color spaces.
The two dominant programming interfaces for 3D graphics, OpenGL and Direct3D, have both incorporated support for the sRGB gamma curve. OpenGL supports the textures with sRGB-encoded color components (first introduced with EXT_texture_sRGB extension, added to the core in OpenGL 2.1) and rendering into sRGB-encoded framebuffers (first introduced with EXT_framebuffer_sRGB extension, added to the core in OpenGL 3.0). Direct3D supports sRGB textures and rendering into sRGB surfaces starting with DirectX 9. Correct mipmaping and interpolation of sRGB textures has direct hardware support in texturing units of most modern GPUs (for example nVidia GeForce 8 performs conversion from 8-bit texture to linear values before interpolating those values), and do not have any performance penalty.
Read more about this topic: SRGB
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