The Color Picker

Why are we talking about the Color Picker in this chapter? Simply, a great many people overlook the fact that the Color Picker is subject to the choices you make in Color Settings, because the numbers that appear in the Color Picker for all the color modes other than the current documentsmode are the product of color space conversions made using the default profiles, engine, and rendering intent.

We've lost count of the number of emails we've received from confused puppies who tried to specify black as 0C 0M 0Y 100K in an RGB document and then got bent out of shape because:

• The resulting color was dark gray.

• It picked up a bunch of C, M, and Y on conversion to CMYK.

Well, 100K isn't black because black ink isn't perfectly black or perfectly opaqueif it were, we'd never need to lay down more than 100% total ink. If you specify 0C 0M 0Y 100K in the Color Picker, then look at the RGB values, or the Lightness value in Lab, you'll find that they aren't zero. And unless your CMYK working space uses Maximum GCR, 0C 0M 0Y 100K isn't a "legal" value for a converted RGB 000 blackwe almost always want to add some amount of CMY to increase the density.

The Color Picker is governed by two simple rules.

• The "real" color being specified is represented by the numbers pertaining to the color mode of the current document, which may not be the numbers you're entering. If you enter CMYK numbers while working on an RGB document, the color you're actually specifying is represented by the numbers that appear in the RGB fields, and vice versa.

• When you specify color in a mode other than the document's, the actual color is calculated by taking the color values you entered, then converting them to the document's mode using the working space profile for the mode you specified as the source profile, the document's profile as the destination profile, and the rendering intent specified in Color Settings.

When you think about it, it's hard to envisage how this could work any other way, but how may of us think about what we're doing when we work in the Color Picker?