Now that we've established the Preference settings that I'd like you to use I want you to change your Color settings, or at least confirm that we have similar Color settings. Go up to the Edit Menu and then choose the Color Settings command or you can press the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Shift+K or Command+Shift+K on the Mac in order to bring up the Color Settings dialog box right here.

Now you may see the Settings Option set to something along the lines of North American General Purpose 2 or something like that. Now there is nothing terribly wrong with these settings, they do ensure that color management is operational inside of Photoshop CS2, however I am not crazy about the default RGB space and if I were to turn more options on, click this More Options button. Notice down here toward the bottom portion of the dialog box, the Intent is set to Relative Colorimetric, which means that Photoshop tries to find the closest match to any given color when displaying a color on screen. Relative Colorimetric is a pretty poor choice where images is concerned. By the way, this intent also affects how Photoshop converts RGB images to the CMYK space.

So anytime you're converting an image from one color space to another, this Intent and this Engine come into play. Now Relative Colorimetric means that Photoshop tries to find the closest color equivalent, which sounds good, but really what you want to do is you want to ensure that your transitions look is good as they can and that's your gradations look is good as they can so that you don't have banding or stairstepping and that kind of stuff.

So what you really want where images are concerned is perceptual, this is by far the best choice for converting images, photographic images, continuous tone images from one color space to another. But I've got a better thing for you to do. If you went ahead and installed the files that are associated with this training series then you can go to the Settings option up here, click the down-pointing arrowhead right here or bring up the pop-up menu, and you'll see an option called Best workflow either in this top portion of Options or in the bottom portion of Options, but some place you should see something that says Best workflow.

I want you to go ahead and choose that. That is going to set your RGB space to Adobe RGB, which is a much richer, a much larger dynamic range of RGB colors that you can work inside of, and you'll notice that I've set Intent to Perceptual as well. Now CMYK is set still to U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2, which is the default setting for Photoshop. If you know that your printer works with a different CMYK space then get that CMYK profile from the printer and go ahead and choose it at this point here.

Alright, otherwise I am very happy with the options as they are set up. Now I want to point out one more thing. If I click on RGB and I go down to this option right there that says Monitor RGB, for me it's set to sRGB IEC blah, blah, blah. If you see the same thing that means you have never gotten around to characterizing your monitor, just as I have not characterized this specific monitor on this presentation machine. Well, that's fine for a presentation machine for a studio work like I am doing here for you, for print work, it's a bad idea. You do want to take a moment in order to characterize your monitor. And if you haven't invested in something like a Pantone Spyder or some other monitor calibration device that's on the market, it should run near between $100 and 200. It includes an actual piece of hardware, a puck, that you stick on your screen actually reads the colors on the monitor and it corrects them so that you will get a portrayal of an image on screen that accurately represents the image you will get when you print that image to a printer -- to a commercial printer. So it's a great investment, I definitely recommend that you pick up some form of monitor calibration from some vendor whether it's a group like Pantone, X-Rite or what have you.

Now you do not want to choose Monitor RGB, you want to leave this set to Adobe RGB 1998. I just want to point out that Monitor RGB will tell you what your monitor space is, and it should be something more useful than sRGB.

Alright, I am going to go ahead and click off that, just make sure that Best workflow is selected and then I will click on OK in order to accept --

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