Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Both Mac OS X and Windows 7 manage color at the operating system level.
Printer drivers also try to manage color at the level of hardware. These layers of
management occur on top of the color management that Photoshop automati-
cally performs. If you set up Photoshop to use sRGB, the colors will shift again
at the operating system level before being displayed on your screen, so what you
see onscreen won't actually be in sRGB.
Configuring Color settings
If you are creating graphics for the Web or mobile devices, the best solution I
have found is to disable color management in Photoshop. If, on the other hand,
you are creating graphics for print, you should use Photoshop's color manage-
ment system with your chosen working color space. In the following steps you
will specify color settings for both situations and then synchronize all your color
settings across the applications in the Creative Suite (if you own more Adobe
applications in addition to Photoshop).
1.
The first step is to create a color profile. How you do this depends on
what equipment you have and what computer operating system you
use. If you own a colorimeter or a (more expensive) spectrophotome-
ter, you can measure the light emitted from your monitor and use the
software included with your device to create an accurate color profile
of your monitor. If not, you can use the color profile or color calibra-
tion utilities that come with your operating system to “eyeball” a pro-
file. (Keep in mind that this is far less accurate than using a meter.)
To eyeball a color profile on the Mac, from the Apple menu
choose System Preferences a Displays and click the Color tab
(see Figure 15.4). Click the Calibrate button and follow the
onscreen instructions.
On Windows, click the Start button and choose Control Panel a
Calibrate Display Color and follow the onscreen instructions.
Save a profile with the name of your computer followed by the
word
Calibrated
(i.e., iMac Calibrated).
2.
Launch Photoshop and choose Edit a Color Settings. Select the pro-
file you just created for the RGB working space in the previous step. I
chose Monitor RGB—iMac Calibrated because I produce web graph-
ics rather than images printed on a desktop printer. If you produce
