Setting up your color settings

Just as a guitarist needs to tune his guitar before he begins to play, so we, too, in Photoshop need to dial in a few settings before we start to work on our photographs. And that's what we're going to do here in this chapter. In this initial movie, we'll take a look at how we can dial in our color settings. Let's go ahead and navigate to the Edit pulldown menu, and then near the base of this menu, you'll see an option for Color settings. Let's click on that in order to open up our Color Settings dialog. You'll notice we have the default settings selected.

What's so interesting to me about these settings is that here we have Photoshop, one of the greatest tools for working with photographs, yet the default settings, well, they just won't cut it. We need to make a few changes to these settings. You notice that the working spaces for RGB, this color space is sRGB. This is kind of like the lowest common denominator. In other words, this color space has a smaller gamut. It gives us less access to different colors and tones. So we need to crank this up.

There are a couple of options that we might want to consider. Typically, photographers will either use Adobe RGB (1998) or ProPhoto RGB. Now, this choice will really be dependent upon what other applications they use. Let's say that you also use Lightroom in conjunction with Photoshop. Well, in that situation, you'd want to choose ProPhoto RGB. In other situations, let's say you just use Bridge and Photoshop together, well then you'd want to choose Adobe RGB (1998). Well, that's going to be our workflow in this course, so I'll go ahead and make that choice here.

The next thing we want to do is change our Gray: Dot Gain. We're going to change this to a Gray Gamma of 2.2. Here, you can see we now have settings which are custom. We'll probably want to save these out in a moment. Well, what about our color management policies? Well, it's critical that we leave these three options on, preserve these embedded profiles. In other words, if we open up a document, we want that profile which is attached to that document to be preserved. Now, if there is a profile mismatch, we want it to ask us when opening these or when we're pasting an image from one document to another.

What are profiles, and why did these matter? Profiles are really critical. In a sense, it's this color information which is tagged or which is included with the image. And what profiles allow us to do is to more accurately view, represent, and eventually reproduce the color of a photograph. So when we're working with color profiles, one: we want to preserve all the embedded profiles, and then two: we want Photoshop to ask us how we want to handle these if there is a profile mismatch. Now, later in this course, we'll take a look at these mismatches.

Yet here in regards to our color settings, we just want to turn these options on. Well, now that we've made these really critical and important changes, one of the things that you might want to do is save these settings out. One way that you could do that is to click on the Save button here. I'll go ahead and save these. I'm just going to name this co-photography, and then I'll click Save. Now that I've done that, we can save these. And in this pulldown menu we can have access to these Color settings. You can see I can simply choose those in order to make sure that I'm working with the appropriate settings.

Well, in order to apply these settings, all that we need to do is to click OK, and now Photoshop is tuned up in regards to our Color settings, and we're now ready to move to our next step.