Chapter 10. Colors and Color Management

As the Hollywood titan Sam Goldwyn said about color television, "Bah, I won't believe it until I see it in black and white." So, here it is, in black and white how to work with color and color management. These are probably the most confusing aspects of graphics and electronic publishing. Just the words "colors" and "color management" are enough to send grown men and women into paroxysms of fear and dread. Fortunately for Creative Suite users, understanding, creating, and managing colors does not have to be a frightening experience. In fact, Adobe has made the entire experience easy enough that anyone even the color illiterate can handle it with ease.

In this chapter we'll help you calibrate your monitor so that the colors you're looking at are correct. We'll also look at the basics of setting and synchronizing color management among the Creative Suite applications. We'll give a glossary of color terms for defining and managing colors. We'll explain the different color modes for documents as well as how to change the color mode for a document. We'll show you the different ways to define colors as well as exchange colors between Creative Suite applications. We also take you through a crash course on defining and using spot colors in documents. We'll explain how to apply colors to objects. Finally, we'll look setting the color-management controls for printing and creating PDF files.