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are using the right settings for a photography setup). So if you live and work in the US, choose North America Prepress 2 and you will mostly be fine with that setting. Please note that choosing a prepress setting changes the RGB working space from sRGB to Adobe RGB. This is a good thing to do if you intend editing RGB photographs in Photoshop (although I would personally recommend using ProPhoto RGB). The prepress settings also adjust the policy settings so as to preserve embedded profiles and alert you whenever there is a profile mismatch. I would also suggest you turn off the ‘Ask When Opening’ option in the Profile Mismatches section. This minimizes the number of times you are shown the profile mismatch warning dialog when working with image files that are in different color spaces. When you customize the color settings presets in this way, the preset menu will say ‘Custom’. I suggest that you then save and name this preset so that these settings are easy to access in future.

Figure 2.9 The Photoshop Color Settings. All the Photoshop color settings can be managed from within this single dialog ( ) and shared with other Creative Suite applications (see Figure 2.10).

Color managing the print output

This leaves the question of how to profile the print output? Getting custom profiles built for your printer is a good idea, and it is a topic that I'll be covering in some detail in Chapter 12. However, calibrating and building a profile for your display is by far the most important first step in the whole color management process. Get this right and the canned profiles that came with your printer should work just fine. Follow these instructions and you should get a much closer match between what you see on the display and what you see coming out of your printer. Although without doubt, a custom print profile will help you get even better results.

Once this is done, the Color Settings will remain set until you change them. After that, all you need to worry about is making sure that the calibration and profile for your display are kept up-to-date. You don't need to worry too much more about the ins and outs of Photoshop color management just yet, but as your Photoshop knowledge increases you will definitely want to read in more detail about the color management system in Chapter 12 as well as Chapter 13 on print output. Color management does not have to be intimidatingly complex, nor does it have to be expensive. So the question is, do you want good color or simply OK color? Or, to put it another way, can you afford not to?

Synchronizing the Color Settings

If you are using other programs that are part of the Adobe Creative Suite, such as Illustrator and InDesign, it is a good idea to keep the Color Settings synchronized across all of these programs (see Figure 2.10). Once you have selected a desired color setting in Photoshop, I suggest you open Bridge and synchronize the Color Settings there too. This ensures that the same color settings are used throughout all the other programs in the Creative Suite.

Figure 2.10 The pie chart icon in the Color Settings dialog tells you if the Color Settings have been synchronized across the Creative Suite or not.

Extras

An internal 16× or faster DVD/CD drive is usually fitted as standard in most computers. Devices such as a graphics tablet, external hard drive and other peripheral devices can be connected using one of the following interface connection methods.

USB is a universal interface connection for Mac and PC. The older USB 1 connection was regarded as being very slow, but the newer USB 2 interface connection is more universal and faster, especially for those working on a PC system. You can have up to 127 USB devices linked to a single computer and you can plug and unplug a USB device while the machine is switched on. FireWire also has the potential to provide fast data transfer rates of 49 MB per second (and is faster still using FireWire 800) and is popular with Macintosh users.

Graphics tablets

I highly recommend you get a digitizing graphics