Chapter 7. Color Management

Courtesy of Michael Slack, www.slackart.com

This would be so much easier if I weren't color-blind.

—Donkey from the movie Shrek

Adobe made changes to the Print with Preview dialog box and moved some of the color management features in Photoshop CS2.

This chapter should probably be named “Confessions of a Photoshop Expert,” and it's the one that I wish I could have read myself a few years ago. My embarrassing secret? There was a time I found color management to be so painstakingly cumbersome and time consuming that I found every reason to avoid it. That all changed with Photoshop 6, and now that I've stared the Boogeyman in the face I'm pleased to be able to help you successfully negotiate the rat maze of issues that are involved in getting your colors to behave themselves.

For years, I was frustrated because I'd scan an image and adjust it so it looked great onscreen; then I'd print it on my desktop color printer and it just never looked right. The colors were oversaturated, or the whole thing looked bluish. Then I'd work with it more until it was “acceptable” on both my screen and desktop printer, but when I sent it out to be printed in a brochure, it would look quite different. I just couldn't fathom why the colors were never consistent. That was back in prehistoric times when I was using Photoshop 3.

Later, when Photoshop 5 was released, there was a great deal of hype about its wonderful “new and improved” color-management features. It was supposed to make everything perfect. Your screen would match your desktop printer and you could have either one of them simulate a printing press. But when I tried to learn what was necessary to get everything set up, the experts seemed to talk in a foreign language that I simply didn't understand. They loved to talk about gamut, profiles, delta E, colorimeters…and the terms just kept coming. They just didn't speak my language, and when I tried to implement everything they were telling me, I got so frustrated that I just ended up turning off all those fancy features. I mean, I'm supposed to be a Photoshop expert and here I was turning off the one feature that was supposed to help me the most. I was even on a first-name basis with the people who write Photoshop and with many color-management “experts” around the country, and I still couldn't get my head around it.

Every time Adobe released a new version of Photoshop, I'd throw myself back into the color-management labyrinth, driving my “expert” friends crazy as I tried to distill all the terms, technology, and techniques into something workable. But it was still too complicated for me to get it to really work comfortably in my situation. There were just too many details and far too many settings. I'd have to have a color-management expert on staff just to keep things running correctly. At last, Photoshop 6 came along, and that's when I felt things had matured to the point that I could get some traction with all this wizardry.

I finally realized that all those highfalutin terms were just the technical people strutting their stuff. It's not rocket science we're talking about, after all. The truth is that all this stuff can really work if you can just get over a bunch of terms and figure out how to deal with a few simple settings. And once it's all set up, you don't have to do that much to maintain everything. Not only that, but with things working properly, you can do some amazing things. You can get your screen to match your printer, get your desktop printer to simulate a printing press, and much more. So, now that I've bared my soul, let's jump in and see what all the fuss is about.

For me to truly understand anything in Photoshop, I usually have to simplify it to such an extent that it becomes almost obvious. So, let's start out from the beginning and slowly work our way into the more technical bits. I promise this will all make sense and will be easy for you to set up things for your situation. Stick with me, because once you've gotten this nailed, your Photoshop life will be infinitely easier. Here goes….