Reading a gamut triangle as the whole story, when gamuts are three-dimensional and lightness changes what a device can reach.
Colour
Colour gamut
Also called color gamut, gamut or gamut range. Here is what it means, when it changes what you export, and what people get wrong.
ColourRuns on your deviceUpdated 10 August 2026
The short answer
A colour gamut is the range of colours a particular space, screen or printer can actually reproduce. Human vision sees more colours than any device can produce, so every gamut is a subset. Colours falling outside it are described as out of gamut and have to be mapped to something reproducible.
Updated
The short version
Colour gamut at a glance
| Quick fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| What it describes | The colours a space or device can reproduce |
| Baseline | sRGB, the web default |
| Display P3 | Wider than sRGB, especially in reds and greens |
| Adobe RGB | Wider than sRGB, especially in cyans and greens |
| Rec. 2020 | Much wider, not fully covered by consumer displays |
| Handling overflow | Clipping, or perceptual compression |
Slide the table sideways to see every column.
How wide are the common gamuts?
sRGB is the baseline everything else is compared against. Display P3 reaches further, most noticeably in reds and greens, which is why a saturated red on a recent phone looks deeper than the same file on an older sRGB monitor. Adobe RGB also extends beyond sRGB but in a different direction, mainly through the cyans and greens, which is why it suits print work where those are the colours ink can reach and sRGB cannot.
Rec. 2020, used for HDR and UHD video, is much wider again. Its primaries are so extreme that no consumer display reproduces the whole thing, so content authored in it is always being mapped down at playback.
Printing gamuts are a different shape entirely. A CMYK press cannot match a screen's bright saturated blues and greens, but it can reach some yellows and warm tones that sit outside sRGB. Neither gamut contains the other, which is why converting between them always involves trade-offs.
Why is a gamut not really a triangle?
The familiar diagram, a triangle drawn on a horseshoe of visible colours, only plots chromaticity. It leaves out lightness, and gamuts are three-dimensional solids rather than flat shapes.
That omission hides a real effect: a device may reach a highly saturated blue at low lightness and be nowhere near it at high lightness. Two spaces whose triangles look similar can behave quite differently on bright saturated colours. This is also why you see two separate figures quoted for displays, one for how much of a standard's area is covered and another for total volume, and why a large volume number does not mean a screen covers the colours you care about.
What happens to a colour that is out of gamut?
Something has to give, and you choose what. Two approaches dominate.
- Clipping, the colorimetric approach. Colours inside the destination gamut are left exactly as they are, and anything outside is snapped to the nearest reproducible colour. Accurate where it fits, but several distinct shades can collapse onto the same value, so a saturated red jumper loses the shading that showed its folds.
- Perceptual mapping. The whole range is compressed to fit, so relationships between colours survive. Nothing collapses, but every colour shifts a little, including ones that were already reproducible.
Neither is universally right. Clipping is the better choice when only a few pixels sit outside the target; perceptual is better when a large, important area does, such as a vividly coloured product going to print.
How do you spot out-of-gamut colours before they cause trouble?
Use soft proofing. Editors let you preview an image through a destination profile, whether that is sRGB or a specific printer and paper, and most offer a gamut warning that flags the offending pixels directly.
The colours that most often cause problems in product photography are saturated oranges, deep royal blues, and the fluorescent pinks and greens of sportswear and packaging. If those are the selling point of the item, photograph and edit them knowing they will be compressed, and describe the colour in the listing text as well as showing it. Relying on the photograph alone to convey a colour that no ordinary screen can display is how you collect returns.
What people get wrong about colour gamut
Each one is a real failure mode, not a style preference.
Choosing a wide working space and then exporting untagged files, so the extra gamut is thrown away by software assuming sRGB.
Expecting a printer profile to reproduce a fluorescent colour, when it can only decide how gracefully to give up on it.
Assuming a wide-gamut monitor makes your edits more accurate, when an uncalibrated one in a non-managed viewer simply oversaturates everything.
Questions people ask
Colour gamut, answered
The follow-up questions people search for once they have the definition.
What does out of gamut mean?
It means a colour in your image cannot be reproduced by the destination, whether that is a colour space, a screen or a printer. The conversion has to substitute something reproducible, either by snapping it to the nearest available colour or by compressing the whole range to fit.
Is a wide-gamut monitor worth it for product photography?
Only if it is calibrated and you work in colour-managed software. An uncalibrated wide-gamut screen shows sRGB images oversaturated, which leads you to edit against a false reference. A calibrated sRGB monitor is more useful than an uncalibrated wide one.
Why can't my printer reproduce the colours I see on screen?
Because screens emit light and ink reflects it, so the two gamuts have different shapes. Print cannot reach a screen's brightest saturated blues and greens, though it can hit some warm tones that sRGB misses. Soft proofing through the printer's profile shows you the difference before you commit.
Does a bigger colour gamut mean better image quality?
Not by itself. Gamut sets the range of colours available; bit depth sets how finely that range is divided. A wide gamut at 8 bits per channel spreads the same 256 steps over more colour, which can actually make banding more likely.
Same cluster
More from the glossary
Neighbouring entries, so every term in the set is one hop from every other.
Colour profile
A colour profile is the data attached to an image that says which colour space its numbers belong to.
Clipping path
A clipping path is a vector outline drawn around a subject so that everything outside the line is hidden.
Colour tag
A colour tag is the small piece of metadata in an image file that declares which colour space its pixel values belong to.
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Sources
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