Photoshop and Color Management - Color Management for Photographers - page 87

profile from a document. Picking Don't Color Manage this document from
the Assign Profile command will strip the profile from the document and
when the document is saved, it will become untagged. The other way to
save a document untagged is to uncheck the Embed Color Profile check box
found in the Photoshop Save dialog. (See Chapter 9, Tutorial #6: “Assign
Profile versus Convert to Profile Command.”)
Why save files without an embedded profile? Suppose you are
sending a large group of images to a web page, which can't utilize the
embedded profile. The profile only increases the file size of the resulting
document. In such a case, removing the profile might make sense.
Suppose you have hundreds of images in a print/output space all set to
go to one device. You know that no one will open, view, or edit the doc-
uments. There's little reason to have an embedded profile since the
numbers are already correct for the output device the documents will be
printed on. You can save a great deal of disk space. (See Chapter 9,
Tutorial #7: “How to Handle Untagged Documents.”)
When to Use Assign Profile In nearly all situations where you are pro-
vided with an untagged document, the Assign Profile command is where
you'll tag (assign, embed) an ICC profile for that document. It is no longer
undefined and untagged. In some rare cases, a user might assign the
wrong profile and in such a case, you could use the Assign Profile
command to correct this. If all users were forced by law to tag their files
with the correct ICC profile, Adobe might be able to remove the Assign
Profile command. Since that is unlikely to happen, we need some mech-
anism to deal with untagged or incorrectly tagged files.
Convert to Profile
The Convert to Profile command found in the Image-Mode submenu in Pho-
toshop CS ( Edit menu in Photoshop CS2) is a very flexible command
where all color space conversions using ICC profiles can be conducted.
Convert to Profile changes the numbers and at the same time assigns the
destination profile to the document. You can conduct RGB to RGB con-
versions, RGB to CMYK conversions, CMYK to RGB conversions, RGB
to Grayscale conversions, and so forth. Many of the options seen here
have been discussed in the color settings section.
Unlike the Image-Mode-CMYK Color command, which is tied directly to
the CMYK working space in the color settings, Convert to Profile allows a
user to pick any CMYK ICC profile installed on their computer. Notice
in Fig. 2-18 there are areas named Source Space and the Destination Space .
The source space is locked and reminds us what the current document
color space is for the subsequent conversion. The destination pop-up
menu allows us to pick an ICC profile to use for the conversion from the
source space. If the document is untagged, the working space for the open
document is selected from the color settings; the preferred working
spaces.