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When Color Settings are different in Adobe Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator, these applications will have disjointed and often confusing color behavior. Choosing the right settings and synchronizing across all Adobe CS2 applications is important in managing your sanity and getting consistent results.
North America General Purpose 2
Locate Color Settings in any Adobe application
by choosing Edit > Color Settings
(Shift-Command/Ctrl-K). For most purposes, choose the default that comes with CS2 applications: North America General Purpose 2 for North American installations (users in other geographic locations will use General Purpose 2 setting
based on your localized installation of CS2).
Embedded Profiles vs sRGB
One might question the use of sRGB as the RGB Working Space; however, the primary purpose of the Working Space in this instance is to serve as a default profile for images that don’t already have one embedded. Since the RGB Color Management Policy is set to preserve the Embedded Profile, an embedded profile is always preferred instead of sRGB. There are lots of untagged images in the world, and the vast majority of them are sRGB. Photographers using Adobe Camera
RAW are still encouraged to continue using a preferred editing space such as Adobe RGB (1998) or ProPhoto RGB in RAW itself.
North America Web/Internet
For Internet-only production work, the North America Web/Internet settings will suffice. This implies you never do work for anything other than content destined for the Internet. The Convert to Working RGB Color Management Policy makes this color settings file ill-suited for any purpose other than Web work—it wants to convert everything to sRGB upon opening it.
Profile Mismatches
When relying on the Convert to Working RGB Color Management Policy, ensure Profile Mismatches: Ask When Opening is checked in the Color Management Policies dialog box. This serves as a safeguard by displaying the Profile Mismatch warning dialog every time you open an RGB image
that is tagged with something other than sRGB. Most people doing Web work will find this warning annoying, so you might be better off unchecking it and save your own Color Settings File using the Save option in this dialog box.
Source Space Profiles
For those who occasionally need images prepared for the web using Photoshop, I recommend you use North America General Purpose 2. Prior to using Save for Web or sending the image to Image-Ready, choose Edit > Convert to Profile, and configure. The Sour Space Profile may be different than as shown, reflecting
the actual source profile of your document and preserving the color appearance
of your image while putting it into the sRGB color space suited for web work. Proceed to Save for Web, or ImageReady. Expect a high degree of similarity between the original document and what you see in Save for Web and ImageReady. They may not be identical, but it’s a good preventative measure.
Creating Your Own Color Settings
If the included Color Settings File doesn’t fully meet your needs, and you’ve customized the settings according to suggestions from the previous steps, you will want to save your unique settings as their own Color Settings File. While this can be done within Color Settings in any Adobe application, I prefer doing it in Photoshop because after you specify a file name for your Color Settings File, you can also include a description. The descriptionshows up at the bottom of the Color Settings dialog when you mouse over the Settings pop-up menu.
Synchronizing Settings in Bridge
Once you’ve got your Color Settings sorted, launch Bridge and select Edit > Creative Suite Color Settings (Shift-Command/Ctrl-K). This will inform you whether Color Settings are synchronized across applications at the top of the dialog box. Choose your preferred Color Settings from the options. If you’ve created your own, check Show Expanded List of Color Settings Files, select the expanded list in search of your settings file, and click Apply.
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Chris Murphy is president of Color Remedies, specializing in worldwide color management training and consulting. He is also co-author of Real World Color Management.
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