Reproducing Color Accurately - Adobe PHOTOSHOP 5.0 User Manual

Chapter 5: Reproducing Color
Accurately
W
hether preparing artwork for print or
online use, you should begin by
calibrating your monitor. This will
ensure the closest possible match between your
colors on-screen and those produced by a printer,
a video display, or a different computer monitor,
and also between your colors in Adobe Photoshop
and in other software programs. If your monitor
isn't calibrated, the resulting colors may not even
be close to what you originally saw on it.
Most problems associated with accurately repro-
ducing colors from a software program stem from
reconciling the differences between the total set of
colors, or gamut, produced by the red, green, and
blue phosphors of a computer monitor and the
gamut produced by the cyan, magenta, yellow, and
black inks of a printer. In addition, colors can vary
dramatically between different monitors, printers,
and software. The color space for a device is
defined by the gamut it can represent.
Every image file you create needs to reside in a
specific color space. For example, a CMYK file
created for one printer may have slightly different
color characteristics than one created for another
printer. Photoshop requires you to specify what
color space you want to use for all of your RGB,
CMYK, and Grayscale files.
This workflow provides an overview of how to
reproduce colors accurately:
1 Calibrate your monitor as described on page 82.
The Adobe Gamma utility calibrates your monitor
and defines the RGB color space that your monitor
can display. You must calibrate your monitor
before you can display colors accurately on it.
Once you have calibrated your monitor,
Photoshop will compensate for differences
between the color space in which your image
resides and the color space in which your monitor
displays images.
In most cases you should not have to adjust
2
RGB Setup information, especially if you have left
the dialog box at its default settings. However, if
you want to change the RGB color space in which
Photoshop edits RGB images, enter RGB Setup
information as described on page 84.
The RGB Setup dialog box defines the RGB color
space to use for editing RGB images. It also deter-
mines whether images are converted to your
monitor's RGB space when displaying them.
If you plan to create or edit CMYK files, either
3
for print, for color separations, or for exporting to
another application, enter CMYK setup infor-
mation as described on page 86.
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