Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [277]
The Color Settings
The Color Settings are located in the Edit menu. The first item you will come across is the Settings pop-up menu (Figure 12.15). Photoshop provides a range of preset configurations for the color management system and these can be edited to meet your own specific requirements. In Basic mode, the default setting will be some sort of General Purpose setting and the exact naming and subsequent settings list will vary depending on the region where you live.
Figure 12.15 The default settings are just defaults. I advise changing the setting to one of the prepress settings, as this will configure Photoshop to use Adobe RGB as your RGB workspace, and switching on the Profile Mismatches and Missing Profiles alert warnings.
I would recommend that you follow the advice in Figure 12.15 and change this default to one of the prepress settings. So if Photoshop was installed on a European computer, you would select the ‘Europe Prepress Defaults’ setting from this or the ‘More Options’ list shown in Figure 12.16. If a preset color setting says ‘prepress’, this will be the ideal starting point for any type of color managed workflow, especially if you are a photographer. That is all you need to concern yourself with initially, but if you wish to make customized adjustments, then you can make custom changes in the Working Spaces section. For help selecting an ideal RGB workspace, refer back to the section on RGB spaces on pages 640– 641 (where I recommend using ProPhoto RGB). I'll be covering the CMYK and Grayscale settings later.
Figure 12.16 Here is a full list of the preset settings (as seen when ‘More Options’ is selected). The General Purpose presets will preserve RGB profiles, but use sRGB as the RGB workspace instead of Adobe RGB, and CMYK color management will be switched off. This is a little better than the previous Web Graphics default and may help avoid confusion among novice users. In the basic ‘Fewer Options’ mode, the choice will be restricted so that all you see will be the color settings for your geographical area.
Color management policies
The first thing Photoshop does when a document is opened is check to see if an ICC profile is present. The default policy is to preserve the embedded profile information. So whether the document has originated in sRGB, Adobe RGB or ColorMatch RGB, it will open in that RGB color space and after editing be saved as such. This means you can have several files open at once and each can be in an entirely different color space. A good tip here is to set the Status box to show ‘Document profile’ (on the Mac this is at the bottom left of the image window; on a PC it is at the bottom of the system screen). Or, you can configure the Info panel to provide such information. This allows you to see each individual document's color space profile.
Preserve embedded profiles
The default policy of ‘Preserve Embedded Profiles’ allows you to use the ICC color management system straight away, without too much difficulty. So long as there is a profile tag embedded in any file you open, Photoshop gives you the option to open that file without converting it. So if you are given an sRGB file to open, the default option is to open it in sRGB and save it using the same sRGB color space. This is despite the fact that your default RGB workspace might be ProPhoto RGB or some other RGB color space. The same policy rules apply to CMYK and grayscale files. Whenever ‘Preserve Embedded Profiles’ is selected, Photoshop reads the CMYK or Grayscale profile, preserves the numeric data and does not convert the colors, and the image remains in the tagged color space. This is always going to be the preferred option when editing incoming CMYK files because a CMYK file may already be targeted for a specific press output and you don't really want to alter the