Part One: Creating an RBG working space.

The first issue in any colour managed work flow is that your monitor must be calibrated, and your documents should be then tagged with an ICC profile that contains that specific calibration information. What you are doing when you calibrate your monitor is adjusting it to display middle grey. (A grey balance is also how you correct most colour problems in images.) The ICC profile then saves that information with the file so if you view the file on another computer that uses colour management it adjusts the different computers display to view the file in the same way it was originally adjusted.

To calibrate your monitor you have two choices. Buy a hardware calibration device that costs about $300.00 CAN or use the Adobe Gamma Utility software calibration which is free with Photoshop. On a Mac you have a built in calibration utility in your monitor settings menu. All will give you basically the same results. The Adobe Gamma and Mac utility require some thought to understand, but the end result is usually close enough for most people and I find as a teacher that if students understand what happens when you calibrate their monitor they can grasp the whole idea of colour management much better. The Adobe Gamma is the method I will use here.

The first thing to do is set your desktop colour for middle grey. This simple step will make total sense in a few minutes because if you are trying calibrate your monitor it helps to understand what colour you are trying to set it to. Yes, just get rid of all that desktop junk you have on there, it actually just messes up your image correction anyway! Go to the Control Panel of your computer and launch the Display settings dialogue box. Choose Desktop and then Colour. Choose Custom and set it to R 128 G 128 B 128, which is exactly middle grey. Press Add to Custom Colours, press OK, Apply, and then OK again to finish off this step.

Go to the Control Panel of your computer and launch the Adobe Gamma Utility. In the first Dialogue box select step by step wizard. Press next and then under monitor description put in a unique name for your profile, do not use the default!

Press next and set your brightness and contrast settings according to the instructions. Press next and either use what the wizard says as your phosphor type, or if you know this to be incorrect based on the documentation you got with you monitor, change it to the correct one. Press next and you will see a window with a single grey box, deselect the single gamma only option and you will see three boxes coloured Red, Green, and Blue.

This is where everything happens! The dialogue tells you to use the sliders and adjust them until the centre box fades into the patterned frame. This is a bit inaccurate so that is why you set your monitor colour to grey. As you move the sliders you will notice your desktop colour shift. What you are trying to do with the sliders is set the monitor to absolute neutral grey so to do this, do what the dialogue tells you to do for a rough setting and then fine tune it with each slider until you desktop is perfectly middle grey. (If you have a slider highlighted your arrow keys on your keyboard can move the slider.) This takes practice, and if you are having problems what I suggest is to get a greyscale target strip and tape it to the side of your monitor for a reference, or any other neutral grey patch will do. A couple of things to keep in mind for the best results, make sure your monitor has warmed up for at least a half an hour and make sure you can eliminate daylight from getting into the room you are using. I guess in theory it would be best to have standard D50 5000K lighting as well, but that may not be practical. What you just did is what a hardware calibration utility does, although a hardware calibrator may be slightly more accurate and consistent, this method will get you so close you will not notice any difference. The problems people have with it are actually seeing neutral grey, and I have noticed the more experience people have with colour image correction the faster they can do this. Like I said, especially if you have never done this, it requires practice but if you do a lot of image correction you should recalibrate your monitor every week or two so you get pretty fast at it! When you are finished press next.

The next dialogue boxes go through adjusting your white point for your hardware, the monitor is usually set to 6500 and the adjusted white point is usually just left as same as hardware. After that you can use the before and after to preview your new profile, it should look better, if it does not just do it again! Finally press finish and save your profile in the directory that comes up by default. Again, give it a unique name, I usually use the same name as I used for the original description. You are now finished adjusting your monitor and setting up an RGB profile. Time to open Photoshop.

From the Photoshop edit menu open your Colour settings dialogue box. Click on Advanced mode. If you look down the list you should see the name of the description for your profile. Click on that and you have established your RGB working space based on your monitor profile. The first part of setting up your colour management is complete.

Part Two: RGB profiles and soft proofing.

The next part of this can be fairly easy or fairly complicated depending on what you are doing. For a closed system where you are using a computer with a printer and the file will not go beyond your immediate system it is reasonably simple. Most photo printers do not require you to convert the document to CMYK so you can leave your CMYK working space as the default. The only other options you should change are the colour management policies which should be RGB: Convert to working space, and CMYK: Preserve embedded profiles. You should then save your profile using a unique name by clicking on the save button and close the dialogue box. The profile name is used in other Adobe applications to manage colour across different programs like Illustrator and InDesign.

If you work as a graphic designer this dialogue box will require more work but we will come back to that later. Return to the main menu and go to the view menu. Select proof setup and select custom. Any printer that is built for image work should come with a profile of its own. It was probably placed into your colour settings folder when you loaded the drivers for the printer so in the custom dialogue box from the profile menu locate the profile for the printer and paper that you are using. This will give you what Adobe calls soft proofing, where your monitor should display fairly close to what your printer outputs, that is if you figure out the next part! (The paper white option will give you a more realistic softproof because it tends to mute out the colours on the monitor like they were compressed on paper rather than transparent like on the screen, but I tend not to bother with it because I get quite used to how the prints will look once they are printed. Also, just so you know an "intent" is how the colours from one device are reconciled when they are mapped out to another device. No device has the same colours available so this controls how they colours are converted. Perceptual or Relative Colourmetric are the ones you would normally use. )

Part Three: Printed output.

This seems to be where everything falls apart most of the time. It is very important to understand most printers are designed for two types of users, those who use colour management and those who do not. As you have probably figured out by now colour management is not for everyone! If you do not use colour management your printer will try to manage the colour for you but this is definitely not what you want. Using the file menu in photoshop go to print with preview. Select colour management and the source space should be your document RGB colour profile and working space. The print space should be the same printer paper profile you selected in the view menu.

The first dialogue box below is for Photoshop CS and earlier, the second is for CS2.

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Press print and that should take you into your printer settings, from here go into the printers properties. You should have and advanced menu or something similar that allows you to set the colour management for the printer. Go into that and make sure you turn off the colour management! If you do not do this your colour management will not work!

That should give you a colour managed work flow for a typical photo printer. The dialogue boxes I used are for an Epson Stylus Pro 4000, but most printers will be about the same. Good luck and if you still have problems definitely do not email me! For more advanced CMYK information for graphic designers or prepress just keep reading....

Part Four: CMYK conversions.

For images going onto a printing press they must be converted to CMYK. To do this you will need some information from your print service provider on what they recommend for CMYK conversion settings. What happens when you convert a file from RGB to CMYK is that the shadow areas of the file must be somehow distributed across the CMY channels as well as the black(K). These settings make a huge difference to the final printed piece so if you want high quality output you must do this properly. For the photo printer scenario above we left the CMYK working space as the photoshop default, now because we will be doing CMYK conversions we will change this. Go back to the edit menu and open up colour settings again. Go to your CMYK working space and select custom to build your own CMYK conversion settings.

Set up the ink specifications according to what your printer provides. They may also give you a custom dot gain curve which you can set by using the curves option in the dot gain fly down menu. UCA amount is used to add extra ink back into the shadow areas to produce a richer shadow and may or may not be appropriate for the given printing device. Once you have got everything where it should be press OK and then save your profile from the main colour settings menu giving it a unique name. By doing this you not only have set up your CMYK colour management settings in photoshop, but you now have a management profile for all your other Adobe applications.

To implement this in any of the other applications again go to the edit menu in that application and open the colour settings dialogue box, click on advanced mode and load the setting you created in photoshop. You now have a colour managed work flow! Notice the colour management RGB and CMYK policies. These are the ones I recommend using especially for CMYK, it is not a good idea to reconvert CMYK files, just do it once. The dialogue box below is from InDesign. For Adobe CS2 applications just look a bit further down the page because it is just slightly different.

For the Creative Suite Two the colour can be managed through the Adobe Bridge application. This is slightly different in that it automatically manages colour for all the Adobe applications in the Creative Suite. It works the same way. Just save your profile from the colour settings dialogue box in Photoshop and then go to Adobe Bridge and turn them on.

Now the final issue...

Part Five: Printing Proofs.

This is probably the most difficult issue to manage because in essence what you want to do with images as a designer is work in RGB, convert with one CMYK setting, but soft proof with another CMYK device before it goes to another device for final output, usually a printing press. This is how you do it. Leave everything the way it is set up in the colour settings with your custom RGB and CMYK working spaces, but when you want to soft proof load another custom setting that uses the proof profile of the proof printer. This will work if your proofing printer, usually a colour laser device came with a proof profile. Mine in this case did not, so I created another temporary colour settings profile using my RGB monitor profile and the CMYK profile that came with the device, I saved it as a colour settings file and then reverted my colour settings back to how I want them set up for CMYK conversions. That way my proofing profile can now be loaded as a custom setting in the view proof setup menu.

Finally to create a proof go to the print with preview dialogue box and set it up as illustrated using the source space and the print space.

Then exactly like the previous example using a photo printer make sure the colour management systems for the printer are set to off. My laser printer has another setting as you can see.

This will give you a good match on the screen but it is not the exact colour in terms of its true CMYK values. If you want absolute CMYK values on the print, and often you do, change your image mode to CMYK using the conversion settings you created and output it again using the same options. In this case It does not matter if you use document or proof in the source space because they are the same. This is different in CS2, which again is the second image below.

CS2........

I would recommend using a test file that is created in CMYK mode and has blocks of 100% CMYK and another 50% K and maybe 100% C, 100%Y or something. If everything is working perfectly your test page should output using only those inks in those blocks as well as closely resemble what you see on the screen. The real test is the 50% grey, if it is really 50% grey using only black toner or ink you are in business, if not there is something wrong with your settings, so go back and check them again. (You will probably have to look at the grey through a loupe to really see the dots. Keep in mind that what you are seeing is the actual CMYK dots produced by your printer, in order for the colour to be accurate you must check the ink density. If your density is off, your colour will shift, just like on a press.)

No problems! Easy! Thanks and good printing.

Anthony