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of a gray tone by measuring the color values with the eyedropper tool. If you use the eyedropper tool to measure the colors in an image that's in a standard RGB space, such as sRGB, Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB, and the RGB numbers are all equal, it is unquestionably a gray color (see Figure 12.42). Interpreting the CMYK ink values is not so straightforward. This is because a neutral CMYK gray is not made up of an equal amount of cyan, yellow and magenta. If you compare the Color readout values between the RGB and CMYK Info panel readouts, there will always be more cyan ink used in the neutral tones, compared with the yellow and magenta inks. This is because a greater proportion of cyan ink is required to balance out the magenta and yellow inks to produce a neutral gray color in print (if the CMY values were equal, you would see a color cast). This is due to the fact that the process cyan ink is less able to absorb its complementary color – red – compared with the way magenta and yellow absorb their complementary colors. This also explains why a CMY black will tend to look reddish/brown, without the help of the black plate being present to add depth and neutrality.

Figure 12.42 When you are editing an RGB image, the Info panel readings can help you determine the neutrality of a color. If the RGB values are all equal, and the RGB color space you are editing in is one of the standard spaces, such as Adobe RGB, sRGB or ProPhoto RGB, etc., then equal values of R, G & B equate to neutral gray.

When you are retouching a portrait (such as in Figure 12.43), you can use the Info panel CMYK readout numbers to help judge if the skin tones are the right color. Set the panel options to display RGB and CMYK readouts. Then use the eyedropper to measure the skin tone values. Caucasian skin tones should have roughly a third or a quarter as much cyan as magenta and slightly more yellow than magenta. Black skin tones should be denser, have the same proportion of cyan to magenta, but usually a higher amount of yellow than magenta and also some black.

Figure 12.43 You can use the CMYK values in the Info panel to help check if the skin tones are the correct color or not by comparing the percentage of cyan with the magenta and yellow inks.

Keeping it simple

Congratulations on making it through to the end of this chapter. Your head may be reeling from all this information about Photoshop's color management system, but successful color management doesn't have to be complex. Firstly, you need to set the Color Settings to the prepress setting for your geographic region. This single step configures the color management system with the best defaults for photographic work. The other thing you must do of course is to calibrate and profile the display. As I have said before, if you want to do this right, you owe it to yourself to purchase a decent colorimeter device and ensure the computer display is profiled regularly. Do just these few things and you are well on your way to achieving a reliable color management workflow.

Chapter 13. Print Output

The preceding chapter considered the issues of color management and how to maintain color consistency between digital devices, while this chapter deals with the process of creating prints from your images. Photographers reading this book will probably own a color desktop printer and the print quality that you can get from the latest inkjets has improved enormously over the last decade. It is therefore important to have a good understanding of the Photoshop Print and system print dialog interfaces and how to configure the settings to obtain the best quality prints. There are other important issues to address here too, such as how to use soft proofing to anticipate as best you can how the colors will actually be reproduced in the final print.

Rather than go into all the details about different print processes, the different ink sets and papers that you can choose from, I have pared this chapter down to concentrate on just the essentials of inkjet printing. These other topics have been elaborated