Keeping Your Work Environment Neutral


Your work area affects how you judge your images. Your eyes are both your best friend and your worst enemy when it comes to evaluating images. Paint the wall behind your display a bright shade of red, and you have just desensitized your eyes to that hue. Your brain has a built-in filtering system that constantly compensates for your viewing environment. As a result, if you work in a room painted bright red and manually adjust the color of an image, it will undoubtedly result in unwanted excess red values.

Adjusting Your Work Environment

1.

Paint your walls a neutral gray.

2.

Purchase daylight-balanced lighting for your work area. These lights are readily available in specialty lighting stores and can replace fluorescent and other type of lighting.

3.

Dim the lights so that your display's luminance is brighter than the room.

Okay, you don't have to paint your office to do the lessons in this book, but taking all of these steps will create a work environment that will help you more accurately evaluate the color and quality of your images.

Adjusting Your System Preferences

The look of your default desktop background and interface colors are awe-inspiringly stylish. The experts who created these looks and backgrounds are certainly talented artists. However, when you are making critical color corrections and working with images in postproduction, it pays to be bland. Let's adjust some System Preferences to neutralize your workspace.

1.

In the Finder, choose System Preferences from the Apple menu.

2.

Select Display.

3.

Choose your working resolution, and choose Millions from the Colors pop-up menu.

Note

If you are using an LCD display, make sure you select the native resolution of that display. Native resolution information can be found in the manufacturer's documentation.

4.

Click the Show All button in the upper left corner of the System Preferences pane.

5.

Click the Desktop & Screen Saver icon. If the Screen Saver pane appears, click the Desktop button to view the Desktop pane.

6.

Choose Solid Colors from the list at the left. Then, choose the Solid Gray Dark color square.

7.

Click the Show All button.

8.

Choose Appearance.

9.

Choose Graphite from the Appearance pop-up menu, and choose Graphite from the Highlight Color pop-up menu.

If you have been using Mac OS X's default setup, you should now notice that your close, minimize, and maximize buttons are gray instead of red, yellow, and green.

10.

Close System Preferences.

Welcome to your new life working in a dark cave.




Apple Pro Training Series(c) Aperture 1.5
Apple Pro Training Series: Aperture 1.5
ISBN: 0321496620
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 190

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