Color Gamut
Color gamut is the range of colors a device or color space can reproduce, typically compared against standards like sRGB or Adobe RGB.
A color gamut defines which colors in the visible spectrum a given medium (monitor, printer, paper combination) can produce. Different gamuts can reproduce different subsets of the full range of colors the human eye can see.
Common gamut standards include sRGB (the baseline for web and most consumer devices), Adobe RGB (wider, used in photography), and ProPhoto RGB (wider still, used in high-end photo workflows). Printers and paper combinations have their own gamuts that overlap with but don't perfectly match these standards.
When a color exists in the source image's gamut but not in the printer's gamut, the printer has to substitute the nearest color it can produce. This is why a brilliant in-monitor color can sometimes print looking slightly muted — the specific hue is outside what the paper-and-ink combination can reproduce.
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