CMS Utilities - Color Management for Photographers - page 279

installed on the hard drive. The drawing engine built into Mac OS X that
creates images onscreen is called Quartz . Quartz needs to have a profile
specified for untagged documents in order to produce a preview. There-
fore, this Preference panel is where you tell ColorSync what to assume
for untagged documents by specifying profile defaults. Note that in OS X
10.4 this preference was removed.
All rendering in Mac OS X, whether onscreen or for print, is done
with Quartz, the built-in and PDF-based composted windowing system.
Because Quartz is color managed using ColorSync, it relies upon prop-
erly profiled content to provide accurate color to each application. The
Preferences pane is where a user may specify which profiles to use for
untagged images, should—and this is very important—an application
query ColorSync for this preference. Generally, only professional applica-
tions like those from Adobe and Quark will query this preference setting.
Other applications including Safari, Mail, and Preview will match the
color to the display profile.
In Chapter 2, I discussed the ability to load a Photoshop color setting
called ColorSync Workflow . That allows Photoshop to go to ColorSync to
get the profiles for RGB, Grayscale, and CMYK devices. The profiles
selected in this area of the ColorSync preferences will load in Photoshop's
color settings as preferred working spaces when Photoshop is set to use
this ColorSync Workflow option. The idea here is that ColorSync can be uti-
lized as a system-level, central depository for setting up preferred ICC
profiles and that some (or all) software products can access this infor-
mation directly from ColorSync. This isn't a preference that has anything
to do with untagged documents per say, yet this area can provide the
initial basis for setting up RGB, CMYK, and Grayscale profiles for access
by other applications. My opinion is the instructions seen in the prefer-
ences are simply incorrect with regard to using profiles for untagged doc-
uments—at least for some applications. Until Apple produces consistent
behavior with respect to what's going on in this part of the ColorSync
utility, I would recommend ignoring this area. If you are using multiple
Adobe applications and want them all to use the same color settings, then
perhaps you will want to select the preferred profiles in this location and
set those Adobe applications to use ColorSync Workflow or use Bridge
in the CS 2 suite.
The CMM option is an area to tell ColorSync what CMM to use, and
again, the recommendation I'd make is to use the ACE CMM within Pho-
toshop and other Adobe applications. Since ACE isn't available outside
of these products, the CMM options in the ColorSync utility are not used.
Profile First Aid
The next panel available is called Profile First Aid . Sometimes profiles
can become corrupted or suffer problems that make them invisible to
applications like Photoshop. Use the Profile First Aid utility to validate or