Closing Thoughts

If you worked up a sweat reading this chapter and thought to yourself, “This is truly a cesspool of unending terms and settings, and I'm never going to get through it all,” you're not alone. That's what I thought at first. But after going through the motions a few times, and perhaps reading this chapter again, you'll get more comfortable with the concepts here and find some sanity in the chaos. In a perfect world we wouldn't have to deal with all this, but the truth is that, from the viewpoint of your hardware, you're really asking for a gargantuan thing when you want your screen to match your printout. All your devices are different, and Photoshop really needs all this information to manage everything gracefully. But if you spend the time, effort, and money it takes to get everything working properly, you will be generously rewarded with very consistent color across all your devices. And your life will become a lot easier when you can trust your screen and know that your $200 inkjet printer is doing a darn good job of both simulating what you saw onscreen and what will appear on a printing press.