From the course: InDesign Secrets

352 Best default RGB - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

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352 Best default RGB

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- [Narrator] I want to share something about color and InDesign's color management tools that most users don't know about. And in fact, it's kind of non-intuitive. If you want consistent color among InDesign and Illustrator and Photoshop, then you may have heard that you need to go to the Edit menu, and then choose Color Settings. And you're supposed to do this in all three programs. And then, you're supposed to come up to the Settings menu and choose the same setting in all of those programs. That way, this little diagram up here will say that it's synchronized color. Now while that does sound good and it can work in some situations, I'm here to tell you that it's not really true. You often don't want the same RGB and CMYK settings in all of your programs. Now first of all, I do need to point out that here in InDesign, any changes you make to this dialogue box, the color settings dialogue box only affects future documents that you create. This does not change the current document or old documents that you've made, just new ones. Also, this settings pop-up menu here primarily loads up different settings down here. For example, it chooses a different RGB and CMYK working space. Now I know this is kind of geeky but here's the thing about these RGB and CMYK menus. You usually do want the same CMYK values in all three programs, InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator but you probably do not want the same RGB value up here. Before I show you what I like choosing in InDesign, I'm gonna switch over to Photoshop and I'm going to show you what I like choosing here. I'll go to the Edit menu, I'll choose Color Settings, and here on Photoshop, I like choosing Europe Prepress 3 from the settings pop-up menu. When I do that, my RGB working space is set to Adobe RGB and the CMYK is set to Coded FOGRA39. Now I like this in Photoshop and Illustrator because this makes CMYK colors look closer to what we usually get on digital presses or other high quality printing presses these days. And here in Photoshop, I do want to use Adobe RGB unless I specifically choose otherwise. The sRGB working space is too narrow or constrained or working space for images that will end up in print. And it's even too annoying for images that may be repurposed so even for web images, I'd still rather edit using Adobe RGB and then convert the image to sRGB when I save the JPEG or PNG or whatever. So I really like Europe Prepress 3 for the color settings inside Photoshop and Illustrator. However, back here in InDesign, here I prefer using the Europe General Purpose preset. Now this gives me the same default CMYK profile so I'm going to get consistent CMYK colors which is good. It also turns off all of these policy check boxes here in the middle which is a relief because most people don't need to worry about those. And here's where it's important, it gets kinda wacky. RGB is set to sRGB but let me tell you why sRGB makes more sense than Adobe RGB here in InDesign. First, remember that this profile tells InDesign what RGB colors look like. It actually defines what red looks like and green and so on. But this sRGB color definition is only used in two situations. First, it's used if you spec a color inside your InDesign document as RGB. Now if you're choosing RGB colors in InDesign, then you're probably making an interactive document, which is going to be viewed on screen. And if that's the case, then sRGB is the right profile to be using. Now the second time that this setting is used is if you import an RGB image into InDesign that has no embedded profile. Now this is the important part, if the image has no profile, then it probably means that it didn't come from Photoshop, which means you probably got this image right off of a website and if that's the case, then sRGB is the safest bet for our color space. So using sRGB for InDesign's default color working space just makes more sense. Now I know that's really geeky and I know you do see this label up here that says they're unsynchronized apps but that's okay. This is one situation where thinking it through is better than just doing what Adobe says.

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