Color Settings in Photoshop
In this tutorial we are going to see how to do color management inside Photoshop…Photoshop has a lot of color management features whose goal is to make the colors you see on your screen match the colors in your prints or colors the other people screens if you are making the images for the web that’s the challenge because every printer and every computer monitor takes the raw numerical values that make up the color and interprets them in slightly different ways .There are several things that you can do to help Photoshop to try to keep color consistent for you. One of the things is to set up Photoshop color setting properly, but even before you do that I urge you to go out and buy the hardware device called color remitter. Color remitter is a device that looks somewhat like a mouse it comes with the software and to gather the software and the hardware measure the way that your particular monitor reproduces color at this point in time it may cost for a couple of dollars for a good color remitter but it is well worth it if you want your output to match what you see on the screen in Photoshop in terms of color.
Now we will see how to set up Photoshop color settings
First open the color setting dialog box from the edit menu + color setting
Now the dialog box opens, you can see the dialog box on your screen like this which is below.
In this there are lot of setting and the explanation are very difficult, Color management is really a big subject but the good news is you don’t have to deal with every single setting here separately.The field at the top is the setting that offers some presets that controls all the settings below
My suggestion is this, if you want to prepare images for print then set the preset to North America Prepress 2 and if you are want to prepare images for web then set it to North America Web/Internet
Important Note 1: As already we saw that when we prepare images for the Internet we should set the color setting to North America Web/Internet, so what i am trying to say is screen shot which you see in this whole tutorial is based on North America Web/Internet or the screen shot are all SRGB color profile so dont use the same photo for practice which i used for this tutorial.when we upload to the web whatever the color profile the image have whether the image have RGB color profile or Apple RGB color profile it will be automatically converted into SRGB color profile
Important Note 2 : So the solution for this is to download the project file which i have attached with this photoshop basics tutorial because you can get the actual photo or the color profile which i used for this tutorial, so that you can practice …
you can check your color profile of your photos by using document information field down at the bottom of the window
Click the arrow to the left of the information field choose show and choose document profile
Now I am going to choose the color settings to North America Prepress 2 and show you what happens to the settings in the below field after selecting the North America Prepress 2 you can see it changes the settings in the below field it sets the RGB working space or the color environment for editing RGB color files to adobe RGB 1998
This workspace is particularly good for the purpose of printing files because it offers the wide range of colors choosing North America Prepress 2 also changed some of the color management policies down here which are basically rules for how to handle colors and any file that you open or in a new file inside Photoshop.
Now open any file in Photoshop by going to file open
Now the dialog box will open
In this you can choose whatever images you want and then click open. Now I am going to open the file which has adobe RGB color profile
Note: The photo below you see is actually had adobe RGB color profile but after uploading to the web it obviously changed to SRGB color profile, so for your practice download the project file which i have attached with this tutorial.
After opening the file which has rgb color profile you get no special messages you don’t have to take any special actions, what I am trying to say is when you open a file that was created in and has been stamped with or tagged with the same color profile as your working space you get no special messages you don’t have to take any special actions when you open the file and if you look at the bottom of this particular image you see the indication that this file has indeed been tagged with an adobe RGB color profile if you don’t see that click the arrow to the left of the information field choose show and choose document profile
Now I am going to open up the other file which has SRGB color profile
After opening the file it immediately shows the message
It’s telling that it’s a mismatch between the color profiles embedded in the file which is an SRGB profile and the color profile that is our working environment and it asks what would you like to do ?
Many cameras automatically embed the SRGB profile in photographs but its not necessarily to work in this profile because photographers love to have more colors available to them so if you are working with the file that comes directly from the camera you may want to convert the colors to adobe RGB working space. Its is very simple to do just click the second option to convert document’s colors to the working space
Now if you look at the document information field down at the bottom of the window you can see that it is really has been converted into an adobe RGB image.
Now I am going to open the other file which has no color profile that means which has no SRGB color profile or the Adobe RGB 1998 color profile the image will have no color profile attached to it you can find this kindly of problem mainly in the photographs which you have taken from mobile phones.
Open the file by going to file + open
After opening the file it immediately shows message that this file is missing a profile which doesn’t have any RGB embedded profile now what would you like to do ?
For now I am going to choose leave as is (don’t color manage) and then later we can choose the color profile so now click ok here and the photo opens in Photoshop
If you look at the bottom of the window you see it is untagged
Now go to edit menu at the top of the screen and choose assign profile that’s the best choice when you have an untagged image and you need to add a profile to it
Then assign profile dialog box opens
In this select the third option called profile
Then we can use this drop down menu to choose the color profile that we want to attach to this particular file I am only going to go through this 5 color profiles which is above the line at the top
Now I am going to choose adobe RGB and show you the result, so here is how it looks when we choose adobe RGB
Next I am going to choose Apple RGB and show you the result, so as you can see from the photo that it gets duller than adobe RGB color profile.
This is the result when I choose SRGB, this SRGB is also duller because it is narrow color range which offering only fewer colors
Finally I am going to choose ProPhoto and this is the end result
After seeing all this color profile in this case I am going to choose adobe RGB and click ok so that’s how I recommend that you deal with the color settings dialog box and then how to handle files that match or don’t match the working space you set up in Photoshop color settings and at last don’t forget to change the color setting we changed, to do this again go to edit + color setting and then choose North America General Purpose 2 so in that way you wont get any warnings when you open most of the file in Photoshop.
What we learnt here is general idea about the color management in Photoshop and there are more color management tasks to do inside Photoshop we will see in depth about the color management inside Photoshop in some other tutorial.