> PHOTOSHOP USER>^ AUGUST 2019[ 48 ]
In the image above, you can see that the two squares
visually appear to be the same blue color because they’ve
been filled from the same color swatch. But the Hue value
measured with the Eyedropper tool as shown in the Info
panel is different for each square. The one on the left reads
196° on the hue wheel, and the one on the right measures
222°. Even though the colors appear the same, they mea-
sure differently! (Don’t worry, we’ll explain why a little later.)SO HOW ARE PIXEL COLORS DEFINED?
Each file you create in Photoshop (and other digital imaging
software programs) defines the color values of its pixels in
two ways.
The Working Image Mode: Image Modes include RGB,
CMYK, etc. and can be found under the Image>Mode
menu. But these just define what sort of color model you
want to use to view your pixels. You can consider these
the top-level definition of your working color environment
and how your pixels are managed. This isn’t, however,
the math that’s used to define each pixel’s value. That
comes from a color profile.The Color Profile: A
color profile is a gamut
used to define the color
space in which pixels
exist as math/code in the
software program. For
the purpose of this ar-
ticle, we’re going to stick
to the basics; otherwise,
this could go deep!
Remember our ex-
ample to the left where
the two files were
filled with the same
blue color but they
measured as completely
different Hue values? Here’s why: Each was saved as a
JPEG file, but they were assigned different color profiles as
shown down at the bottom of the Save As dialog.The first example was saved with the sRGB color profile,
which is the standardized version of the RGB Image Mode
that’s used for all web browsers and most office/business
applications. If you’re putting an image up on a website to
be seen in a browser, for example, or if you were inserting
it into a business document such as Microsoft PowerPoint or
Word, then you want to save it with an sRGB color profile.
The color profile of the second file was defined as
ProPhoto RGB. Just like sRGB was created to offer uniformity
in color displays for the Internet, ProPhoto RGB was devel-
oped and made by Kodak to offer a larger color space for
processing color properties compared to existing RGB color
profiles at the time.For the deep-tech nerds such as myself, ProPhoto RGB
actually encompasses approximately 90% of the CIE LAB
color space, which is the largest color gamut available