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Color Management

It does no good to make a beautiful (or accurate) image if you can't see it or show it properly. To truly see what your camera is capable of creating, and to be able to faithfully reproduce that, you'll need to learn about and use color management. To accurately see and print what's on your screen, you'll need to use color management. And to pass along images to others and know that they'll see them properly, both you and the others will need to understand and use color management. It's not as difficult as it sounds, but you'll soon understand why it's sometimes referred to as "color manglement," due to all the confusion. Here are the steps you'll need to take to be successful with a couple of popular color-savvy programs:

Adobe Photoshop Elements
Elements offers a simple level of color management, allowing you to choose no color management, sRGB or Adobe RGB as your chosen working space.

1 - Open Color Settings... Press Shift-Control- K (Windows) or Shift-Command- K (Mac).

2 - If you don't know what color management is, then choose "No color management" (and come to one of our color management classes sometime).

3 - If you're using a camera that supports only sRGB, then choose "Limited color management - optimized for Web graphics.

4 - If you camera supports Adobe RGB, then you should choose "Full color management - optimized for Print.

Adobe Photoshop
Elements offers a simple level of color management, allowing you to choose no color management, sRGB or Adobe RGB as your chosen working space.

2 - Once you've created a profile, you have to know how to use it, and have software that takes advantage of it. Be sure that the monitor profile you've created is loaded (Windows, check the Display Preferences, and for Mac check the Displays in System Preferences).

3 - Next you have to set up your software to run color management properly. I'll demonstrate the steps you'd use in Adobe Photoshop, but the choices will be similar in any program that uses color management. How do you know if an application supports color management? Look through the preferences in the program for a Color Management setting, and work through it. Here is the way I set up Photoshop, but it's not the only way to run color management. First, if your camera supports it, choose Adobe RGB 1998 as your working space. It's a bit larger color space than sRGB. If your camera only supports sRGB, that's okay too, just make sure and set it as your working space. Next, in the Color Management Policies, set all for "Preserve Embedded Profiles" and in Missing Profiles check "Ask When Opening" and "Ask When Pasting." This means that if Photoshop opens an image that's not in your chosen color space (in this case Adobe RGB 1998), it will ask what you want to do. Leave "Missing Profiles - Ask When Opening" turned off because you'll want to specify an image's color space when you open it up, rather than leave it for the software to sometimes guess at. This is a problem that will go away (hopefully!) in the next few years, but at this time Photoshop can sometimes think that a photo from a digital camera is in the sRGB space when in fact it's been processed by the camera into the Adobe RGB 1998 space. There's a long story behind this, but it has to do with how Photoshop looks to the EXIF data for color space info, and how different cameras record that info. For now, you have two choices:

-- Find out how your camera records that information and whether Photoshop can read it correctly or not, or ...

-- Follow these steps:

-- If using Photoshop 7.0, install the 7.0.1 update and then the Ignore EXIF plugin (both available free from www.adobe.com.

• If using Photoshop CS, turn on the "Ignore EXIF profile tag" in the preferences.

• Now Photoshop won't be confused by digital camera images, but you'll want to be sure to assign the correct profile for the photo when you open it.

4 - Now when you open an image into Photoshop, your first step will be to assign the proper color space. If I have my camera set to Adobe RGB, then I want to be sure to assign that to the image when I open it. Go to Image - Mode - Assign Profile... and set for the correct profile. In this case it's easy, as the image was recorded in the Adobe RGB color space so I just choose "Working RGB - Adobe RGB (1998).". Now this might seem like a bit of a hassle, but you can create an Action to do this in Photoshop with one keystroke. Also, if you're always using images from one color space, you might choose to set Photoshop's Color Settings differently so that images always are assumed to have that space.

5 - When you're done working with the photo and want to save it, make sure the proper profile is assigned. If you want to keep the same "look" you've created in the editing software, but need the image in a different color space, you'd use Image - Mode - Convert to Profile... and choose to convert the numbers representing the colors in the one space to those of another space. You'd do this if you had an RGB image you wanted to send to a photo lab, but the lab expected the images to be in the sRGB color space. Doing a conversion would try to keep the "look" the same but change the numbers to get that same "look" in a different color space. Assign changes the look without changing the numbers, while Convert changes the numbers but tries to maintain the appearance of the colors.

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