We generally scan into the Adobe RGB color space as this encompasses the gamut of most printers. A color space is a specific organization of colors. In combination with color profiling supported by various physical devices, and supports reproducible representations of color -- whether such representation entails an analog or a digital representation. A color space may be arbitrary, i.e. with physically realized colors assigned to a set of physical color swatches with corresponding assigned color names (including discrete numbers) in -- for example -- the Pantone collection), or structured with mathematical rigor (as with the NCS System, Adobe RGB and sRGB).
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