Page 76 - Enhancing CAD Drawings with Photoshop

4386.book Page 59 Monday, November 15, 2004 3:27 PM
CALIBRATION AND PROFILES 59

9. Clear Ask When Opening and Ask When Pasting For Profile Mismatches. Also clear Ask
When Opening For Missing Profiles.

Now you won’t be bothered by having to confirm your decision to assign the working profile
to all your documents, and Photoshop will handle this automatically on all documents you
open or paste into the current document.
10. Click OK to close the Color Settings dialog box.

WARNING Be aware that by clearing the Ask settings you override a document that already has a
profile assigned to it without knowing it. If you work in an office that agrees to use only one profile,
this is not a problem. If you work with multiple profiles, it is best to have Photoshop ask for confir-
mation in every situation. This book will consistently use the Adobe RGB (1998) profile.

Calibration and Profiles
To maintain consistent color between your computer’s peripherals, it is essential that you create a
profile for each device. Because every device has its own color space, each device is characterized by
a unique color profile. The CMM uses these profiles to translate between all the color spaces used
throughout your workflow—from the working space you use when importing from digital cameras
and scanners, to the one used when editing, to the output you see in monitors and printers.
If you are working without profiles, there is no consistency between your input and output
devices, and color will almost certainly be off. In this case, color “corrections” that you make may be
a waste of time because what you see on the screen is not representative of what will be printed, for
example.
In this section you will learn to calibrate your monitor and thus generate its color profile. You will also
decide how you will work with your printers and change profile settings specific to your printer drivers.

Profiling Your Monitor
When you characterize a monitor, you tell the computer how the device performs and store that infor-
mation in a profile. In contrast, when you calibrate a monitor, you actually change the device’s per-
formance. You’ll learn to characterize in this section.
NOTE The subject of calibration is beyond the scope of this book; you can read more on critical color
in Tim Grey’s Color Confidence (Sybex, 2004) for real, advanced fine-tuning.
Each monitor can be characterized by an International Color Consortium (ICC) profile developed
by its manufacturer. You can usually download such profiles from the manufacturer’s website or load
them from the disc that shipped with the product. Once you have an appropriate profile on hand,
here’s how to set it up:
1. Choose Start Control Panel to open Control Panel.