Pro tricks for mastering colour
The Professional Photoshop Book 19
DEANE NETTLES EXPLAINS HOW A HOST OF PHOTOSHOP PROFESSIONALS CAN MANAGE THEIR COLOUR PROCESSES
MANAGE FROM ALL SIDES
Snap right: “A photographer can calibrate
their camera images by shooting a colour target in the light they are shooting in; the
colour of the image can then be adjusted using a plugin to Lightroom like the X-Rite
Color Checker Passport. For this Betsy Fisher bus shelter signage, the photographer colour
balanced their equipment, allowing me to have faithful reproductions of the shoes to
assemble the final art”Don’t worry about the web: You can check
work on every device you have, and your friends’ too, ultimately, you can’t control
how someone else views your web projects. “But it’s still better to have your
side of it calibrated so you know that the quality is the best it possibly can be on
your end,” says NettlesDesign bright:monitor using ‘pucks’ or ‘spyders’ Even “A designer can calibrate their
something as simple as X-Rite’s ColorMunki Smile would be an improvement over an
uncalibrated monitor”Read up: “If you really want to know a lot about colour management, there’s a good (if slightly
out-of-date) book called CS3 by David Blatner and Conrad Chavez”Real World PhotoshopUse your own judgement: “Set Photoshop
to fill your screen, so that photo of your honey on the desktop doesn’t influence
your eye’s ability to see colour”Be a stickler: “If you send a file to a printer, they have in-house colour management; be
sure you get a press proof back from them so you can check the colour, and be sure to go to
the printer and view their proof in their colour-balanced proofing room to be sure of
what you’re seeing. Looking at it at home under mixed lighting sources won’t let you
see colour accurately”KNOW YOUR VALUES
“We are constantly doing colour matching for our
clients,” says Fred Muram. “These jobs range
from product, packaging, food and furniture and
need to be colour corrected to match different
references. I have found the more expensive the
product the more attention that the colour
matches precisely. Our studio has GTI colour view
stations at each workstation to allow us to
correctly view the references in correct light as we
are making adjustments. We also have
spectrophotometers we use to read colour values
from the reference material and get RGB, CMYK,
and Lab values that closely match the sample.”
Essentially it all goes back to the fact that there
are two types of colour mixing; additive and
subtractive. Additive is using the three primary
colours, red, green and blue. Subtractive is using
cyan, magenta and yellow, with the addition of
Key (black) in printing because the other three
don’t create an impressive enough result for large
amounts of the stuff.START RIGHT
Paul Sherfield, who runs colour management
courses through his company The Missing
Horse Consultancy (www.missinghorsecons.
co.uk), says that all too many Photoshop users
don’t understand the settings that you can
access though the Edit menu, which are vital.
“There are a number of colour setting Pre-sets
in a drop down,” he says, “the opening Default
being North America General Purpose 2. This is
not a good setting for professional work,
especially for digital photography and printproduction. It is best to create your own settings
and use better CMYK ICC profiles, which as they
are not in the Adobe CS/CC build, will need to be
installed. However, if this is a step too far then
change the colour setting file to Europe
Prepress 3, which is in the latest versions of
Photoshop. For print production work,” he adds,
“always talk to your printer and or client
[regarding] the CMYK profile to use for
converting images. They may say, supply RGB
images, which they will convert.”© Kevin Smith Photography / Paradigm Color Studio© Herrmann & Starke LLC/ August, Lang & Husak/Deane Nettles016-027 Colour Feature.indd 19 06/10/2015 16: