srcrgb

Srcrgb is a term used in some digital imaging workflows to denote the source RGB color data—the original encoded values as captured by a camera or provided by an image or video source—before any color space conversion, gamma correction, or tone mapping is applied. It is not a formally defined color space, and there is no official standard for srcrgb; its exact interpretation varies by software or pipeline. In practice, srcrgb serves as a provenance tag that helps preserve data origin and guides downstream processing, ensuring that subsequent transforms such as conversion to linear RGB or to a display-referred color space are performed with awareness of the source encoding.

Representations of srcrgb are diverse. Data may be stored as integers (for example 8-bit or 16-bit per channel) or as floating-point values, with the gamma or encoding of the source data described in accompanying metadata. Some systems treat srcrgb as synonymous with the source color data in the sRGB space, while others allow non-sRGB sources and leave the encoding unspecified pending a transformation step. Because srcrgb is not a universal standard, software documentation should be consulted to determine how srcrgb is defined in a given toolchain and how to convert it correctly to other color spaces such as linear RGB or device ICC profiles.

See also: sRGB, linear RGB, color space, color management, metadata.