Now, let us talk about color settings. How do you get reliable color out of Photoshop so that what you see on screen is what you get in print, is what you get inside other applications, other Adobe applications so your colors are not changing on you from one application to another, or from one format or platform to another.

Now, the first thing you want to do is you want to characterize you monitor. Now, this is up to you. This is something you have to do on your own. Characterized your monitor either using Adobe Gamma included with the PC, the display calibrator assistant including with Mac OS10, or you can use a puck that came with your calibratable monitor. Or, you can use a third party device like Spyder, the Spyder from Pantone, really great device that you might want to look into.

So, use something that is to say either software hardware in order to characterize or calibrate your monitor so that Photoshop has some idea of what is working with. Then once you have done that, and even if you have not done that yet, you can always go back that later.

In the meantime, you have also got setup Photoshop’s color settings and here is how I want you to do that.

Go to the Edit Menu, and choose the color settings command. Or, press Ctrl Shift K on the PC side, yes I know that is not the order they listed in. They say Shift Ctrl K -- Ctrl Shift K, same thing, or Command Shift K on the Mac to bring out the color settings dialog box here.

More than likely, you will see things like this. You will see a shorten version of the dialog box with fewer options, that is to say this button right here will say more options on it. Here is what I want you to do.

I want you to go up to the Settings Menu, and I want you to change it from North American General Purpose, which is a halfway decent setting, but it is not great in my opinion, and change it to the best workflow. You should see best workflow if you install the files that came with this training series as directed by the installer utility.

Now, I am going to go ahead and choose best workflow. And if you did not install those files, you can work along with me to change things as follows.

Notice that it is going to have working spaces. The first working space is going to be set to Adobe RGB. This regularizes the RGB space so that your RGB is the same as everybody else’s RGB because RGB is a fluctuating color space. It defies dependent space, so these just isolate it basically. And Adobe RGB happens to be the best RGB space for general work whether you are going to screen or whether you are going to print, okay? It happens to be a little better than SRGB, which is Photoshop’s default.

CMYK, you should sat according to what your printer tells you to set it to. So, you should consult with your commercial printer, they may even able to give you a CMYK space to work with. If you do not have anything better, just leave it set to US Web coded swap or some other country standard for now. Do not worry about gray and spot.

So, this is where working spaces are set to. Color management policy should be set to those you see right here. RGB, CMYK and gray should all say preserve imbedded profiles. That is to say no matter what color space you are working in, when you open up a file, consult the file for the profile that is imbedded inside of it and use that color space instead. So, always retain the color space included with file. So, if you got a file from somebody else and they are working in SRGB and you are working in Adobe RGB, it will go ahead and work in SRGB on the fly, temporarily inside that one file without making any color conversions. So, that is the key.

It would not make a color conversion behind your back, which is a really important thing especially when working with CMYK files.

Profile mismatches a missing profiles on these check boxes, I think should be off so that Photoshop is not constantly bugging you and asking you if you want to keep a profile or throw away a profile or what have you. It just goes ahead and does with you have already told it to do.

And one more thing, go ahea