> PHOTOSHOP USER>^ AUGUST 2019[ 50 ]
There are some good default settings available. Just take
a look at the Settings drop-down menu at the top left of the
Color Settings dialog. You’ll find various preset options in this
menu. These defaults work great for most people who hap-
pily edit without knowing anything about them. But, if you’ve
been frustrated about colors converting and not matching at
output, hopefully you’re beginning to see the bigger picture.
You’ll notice there are no presets for photography, and
in fact, the general-purpose defaults set your document
profile to sRGB in the Working Spaces section. So, if you’re
building composites in new documents, you’re creating in
sRGB by default (with this example), and it’s likely to convert
your pixel information from the source profile, the one from
which you’re copying, into the default sRGB color profile
when you paste your pixels into the new document. That
simple act of copying-and-pasting is altering the values and
colors of your source pixels if you aren’t paying attention to
these profiles.WHAT ABOUT PRINTING?
This process of aligning an RGB profile you’re editing with
the output target profile of your printer is fundamentally
the same. You have a source profile, such as Adobe RGB,
in your image, and you need to convert it to the profile
provided by your printer manufacturer. Note: If you’re
working with larger, commercial printers, you need to ask
for a recent calibrated version of their profile, as its values
change from day to day because of high-volume usage.
If you have your own printer and you’re managing
all of your own output media, then you need to install
what your printer manufacturer provides. They will have
their own instructions on how/where to install that pro-
file in your system. Once it’s installed, as a best practice
you should restart your machine to make sure it’s seen
by Photoshop. Most printer manufacturers, such as Epson,
Canon, etc., have their own utility for installing all this;
however, if, for some reason, you didn’t use that, there
are instructions available online on where you should
place the ICC profile in your operating system.PRINTING MEANS CMYK, RIGHT?
I’m including this segment because I know some people out
there think printing means converting to CMYK. No, print-
ing doesn’t mean CMYK. You can take that line of think-
ing back to 1999 or thereabouts. In that time period in our
industry, we made up all kinds of silly simplified rules for
teaching people; for example, “Web graphics are 72 dpi.”
No, they’re not, and they never were.To emphasize why this is so important, let’s say you
captured, edited, and saved an image as a JPEG, all while
working in the ProPhoto RGB color profile, like the image
on the far right in the example above. If you then uploaded
that JPEG to your Facebook page, it would end up look-
ing like the middle image above: faded, less saturated, and
slightly darker. This is because services such as Facebook
automatically convert your image to sRGB, which is one of
the smallest RGB color profiles; however, it’s an industry
standard because its reduction in gamut size is consistent
due to its having a healthy margin from within the larger
RGB spectrum.
If you need more advanced options with better consis-
tency of conversion, you can use the Edit>Convert to Profile
feature in Photoshop. This gives you more conversion op-
tions for various profiles and image modes.You also need to consider the global color settings in your
workflow, especially if you’re adding graphics and images
into a new document. This is where color profile conflicts
usually start popping up onscreen. Your default preferences
for color profiles aren’t actually found in your Preference
options for Photoshop. Instead, you can find them by
going to Edit>Color Settings.