Photoshop is all about color! When you select an area of an image with a selection tool and make any modifications to it, you are changing the color values of the selected pixels. There are many ways to perform color changes in Photoshop, (contrast, sharpness, lightness, and so forth) and therein lies its power.
Color can present itself on your computer display in a variety of ways. Color working spaces affect how you see color. Much of your editing depends on your perceptions of the on-screen image. Color management and color correction are critical factors in the quality of the image. This section of Photoshop CS Savvy looks at using color settings, managing and correcting color, and preparing files for their ultimate destinationwhether its print, the Web, or even video.
You ve labored long and hard to get the color exactly right. You ve used all the tricks ”Levels, Curves, Selective Color, Color Balance, Adjustment Layers, the Unsharp Mask filter (covered in Chapter 16, Adjusting Tonality and Color ) ”and the image looks perfect on your computer display. Unfortunately, what your printer just spit out looks quite different. Those beautiful sky blues have turned to gloomy blue-gray. Furthermore, the image looks quite different from one display to another.
If you re a digital artist or graphic designer using Photoshop to print color images, you probably frequently ask yourself two important questions: How can I be confident that the color on my display will be matched by the color of the printer? And, how can I trust that the color on my display will look like the color on your display? These questions are about how you manage color from one device to another, and that s what this chapter is about. In this chapter, you ll read about:
Why you need to manage color
Photoshop s color working space
Managing color between displays
Converting colors
Printing images
In the
Desktop technologies created a distributed model for color production. Some of the work was done on a computer that wasn t connected to a prepress color system. It was the differences between systems ”different displays, different viewing conditions, and different software applications ”that created the need for color management.
Scientists went to work on the problem in the late 1980s, developing a model for color management that would eventually provide software tools to ensure that color would match, location-to-location and device-to-device. The first practical color management system, Apple ColorSync, arrived in 1991 and has undergone several significant improvements since. Over the years, Apple s ColorSync technology became the
In the fall of 1998, the Adobe Photoshop development team rocked the design and printing community with a completely new outlook on color. The release of Photoshop 5 got the attention of all color
Photoshop 5 removed that limitation, and created a new component to images handled by Photoshop.