What To Do With Photoshop’s Color Management Dialogs

Color - Management  Comment
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Knowing what to do with the color management dialog boxes you encounter while you’re editing your digital images in Photoshop is the key to making sure that the rich, saturated, wide-gamut color you choose to master your files in stays wide-gamut and doesn’t change – unless you want it to.

When you set Color Settings in Photoshop (Edit : Color Settings), you not only choose Working Spaces (RGB, CMYK, Gray, and Spot) to create new files in (Choose ProPhoto RGB for the widest-gamut color space.), you also set Color Management Policies that determine what happens when you’re dealing with files that are not created or edited in the same color spaces.


For RGB, CMYK and Grayscale files you can choose to turn Color Management Off, to Preserve the Embedded Profiles, or to Convert to Working color spaces. You rarely, if ever, want to turn color management off; you only do this when you want to ensure that no color space conversions take place, for example when opening target files for creating printer profiles. Similarly, you typically don’t want files automatically converted to a default working color space without your knowing that it’s happening, as they are when you set the policy to Convert to Working; you’d only want this to happen when you’re batch converting a number of files to quickly bypass color management dialog boxes. In the vast majority of cases, you’re better off served leaving the default settings at Preserve Embedded Profiles. This way, any time a color management operation is about to take place, you’ll get one of three dialog boxes that not only alert you but also give you control over how the operation is handled.

So what do you do when you encounter these three dialog boxes – Missing Profile, Profile Mismatch, and Paste Profile Mismatch?

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Photoshop Color Settings

Color - Management  Comment
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Excellent Photoshop Color Settings can be set up in a few seconds.

1  Go to Photoshop’s Edit Menu select Color Settings.

2  Start with Settings of North American Prepress 2 and then change RGB to ProPhoto RGB. (Optionally change Gray to Gray Gamma 1.8.)

3  Click OK.

Here’s a little more about the underlying assumptions of this recommendation.

1. Choose a device-neutral wide gamut editing space to create your images in. Wide gamut editing spaces can contain all the data your camera or scanner delivers. Smaller gamut editing spaces may not. Preserve your high-quality information. ProPhoto is today’s preferred wide gamut RGB editing space. It’s the only default that can contain all the colors your camera can capture.

2. Minimize the number of color conversions applied to your files. Set Photoshop to Preserve Embedded Profiles. Always keep your master file in the color space it was created in. Convert only derivative files.

3. Make sure you know about all the color conversions your file goes through. Set Photoshop to alert you whenever a color conversion may take place. Check Ask When Opening / Pasting with Profile Mismatches and Missing Profiles.

Standardize your workflow, using these settings for all your work (with few exceptions).

 

Read more on Color Management here.

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Get More From Smart Objects

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“Any “object” that needs the ability to adjust size and rotation without the normal limitations of layered images is an excellent candidate for Smart Objects … When doing a traditional multilayer composite, the resizing and rotation of a layer can cause image degradation. Positioning and sizing an object has to be a precise operation because if you use Free Transform to make a layer smaller and then find out you actually need it back at the original size (or bigger), you basically have to start over. The way to deal with this situation when doing a complex composite is to make those layers into Smart Objects. Smart Objects are embedded image objects that allow resizing, rotation and other select editing without changing the pixels in the object. The image layers are actually treated as a separate file embedded within the master file. You can’t do all editing on the Smart Object, but you can open the original layers as a temporary file and do pixel-level editing there and then save the changes back into the Smart Object; the changes will auto-update in the image in which the objects are embedded.” – Jeff Schewe
Read more about Smart Objects at Digital Photo Pro.
Get Schewe & Evening’s book CS5 for Photographers: The Ultimate Workshop.
Learn more with my online resources.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Use Screenshots For Complex Notes In Photoshop

Printing, Software - Photoshop  Comment
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Adopt a non-destructive workflow. When you can’t, take notes.

Non-destructive Photoshop workflows do more than let you change edits to a file in perpetuity, they also create a record of what you’ve done to an image. For instance, when you reopen a Smart Object, you can simply check the interface to see any and all of the Adobe Camera Raw settings currently being applied. So, if you’re not sure whether the latest detail rendering and noise reduction algorithms are being used for a given file, all you have to do is open the Smart Object to verify this. Or, when you click on an adjustment layer you can see those settings in the Adjustments panel. So, if you’re not sure whether an adjustment layer caused clipping, you can toggle it on and off to verify this; if it is you reset the values; if it’s not you find the real source for the clipping.

Despite Photoshop’s increasingly flexible interface, there are still many times when you need to work destructively. Not all edits can be applied as Smart Objects, Smart Filters, or adjustment layers. Many filters still can’t be applied as Smart Filters. HDR merge settings can’t be applied non-destructively. Adjustments from third-party plug-ins, such as noise reduction with Noiseware or Tonal Contrast from NIK’s Viveza can’t be applied non-destructively. But you can create records of the settings you use with destructive edits, making it easier to see what you did later and helping make future refinements faster and more precisely.

How? Take notes in Photoshop. There are many ways to take notes in Photoshop. There’s the Note tool. You can use a Text layer. You can record information in the title of a layer. For complex settings, all of these can be more abstract and time-consuming than necessary, reducing the likelihood that you’ll actually make them.
There is an easy way to make notes of complex interfaces. Use screenshots. A screenshot takes a picture of your screen, either entirely or partially. Store images of the destructive edit settings inside the file you used them on and you’ll have excellent notes for future reference. Doing this only takes a few seconds. Read More