Now let's take a look at your Color Settings inside of Photoshop CS3 and exactly what you need to in order to get your color to be the best it can be here inside the program. So in order to do that I am going to come up to the Edit Menu and I am going to chose Color Settings. This nice dialog box is going to appear on our screen. By default, you should see something like North America General Purpose 2 in your Settings right here.

So that's okay, we don't need to change anything there, but I am going to ask you to change your Working RGB Space. So by default, it is set to RGB and then a whole bunch of letters and numbers. What I am actually going to have you do is change this to Adobe RGB (1998). By doing this, what we are going to be doing is we are actually going to be expanding the total range of this color space. So we are actually working in a wider dynamic range of colors inside of Photoshop. It is just going to help us to better see our images on the screen.

Now I am going to tell you also to leave your CMYK settings alone. Unless you know the specific CMYK space that your printer is going to use for this particular setting, you don't need to touch that. That is a big thing to remember. You don't need to touch that at all. So we are going to leave that alone and I am going to come over here.

I am going to check More Options. When I do that, you are actually going to see this new set of options appear down here. I am going to leave the Engine set alone and I am going to change my Intent to Perceptual. I am changing this because the default of Relative Colorimetric is not a good idea for when you are working with continuous tone images.

Relative Colorimetric actually attempts to find the closest match to any given color when displaying it on the screen. That's a bad choice for digital imaging because we want to see on screen exactly what is coming off of our printer. By changing the Intent to Perceptual, we are actually going to eliminate both the on screen preview problem and we are also going to eliminate banding and stair-stepping when we actually print the finished product.

So this is just a better choice for continuous tone images and it is a whole lot better than any of the other intents that we have here inside of the Photoshop program. Now that we have got all of our color settings exactly where they need to be, you can go ahead and either click OK or hit Enter or Return on your keyboard to commit to those changes.