Choosing A Color Mode - Adobe PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS Manual

CHAPTER 3
68
Working with Color
• Saturation, sometimes called chroma, is the
strength or purity of the color. Saturation repre-
sents the amount of gray in proportion to the hue,
measured as a percentage from 0% (gray) to 100%
(fully saturated). On the standard color wheel,
saturation increases from the center to the edge.
Brightness is the relative lightness or darkness of
•
the color, usually measured as a percentage from
0% (black) to 100% (white).
Although you can use the HSB model in
Photoshop Elements to define a color in the Color
Picker dialog box, there is no HSB mode available
for creating and editing images.
A
A. Saturation B. Hue C. Brightness D. All hues
RGB model
A large percentage of the visible spectrum can be
represented by mixing red, green, and blue (RGB)
colored light in various proportions and inten-
sities. Where the colors overlap, they create cyan,
magenta, yellow, and white.
B
C
D
Because the RGB colors combine to create white,
they are also called additive colors. Adding all
colors together creates white—that is, all light is
transmitted back to the eye. Additive colors are
used for lighting, video, and monitors. Your
monitor, for example, creates color by emitting
light through red, green, and blue phosphors.
Additive colors (RGB)

Choosing a color mode

Photoshop Elements provides several color modes
for displaying and printing images. The color
mode you choose determines the number of colors
that can be displayed in an image and can also
affect the file size of the image.
About color modes
Photoshop Elements provides four color modes:
RGB, Bitmap, Grayscale, and Indexed color.
RGB is the default mode for new
RGB mode
Photoshop images. It uses the RGB color model to
assign an intensity value to each pixel ranging
from 0 (black) to 255 (white) for each of the RGB
components in a color image. For example,
a bright red color might have an R value of 246,