Color Settings in CS3

Posted on Tuesday, September 09, 2008:: 1089 Views

For those of you who bring your images to a lab for printing, you've probably run into the problem of not having your images saved in sRGB. You might have received some gray and somewhat lifeless pictures when you were expecting vibrant and magnificent images. The Adobe 98 vs. sRGB topic has already been discussed here, but knowing how to nip this problem in the bud is critical.

There is a way in Photoshop to have the program warn you when an image is not in the correct color space, and it only takes a second or two to set up. What you want to do is goto Edit, then almost all the way down towards the bottom, Color Settings. You can also get there buy hitting the keyboard shortcut: Shift + CTRL + K (thats, Shift + Command + K on a Mac).  A rather large dialogue box appears but not to worry, we're only concerned with a few of the options here. For starters, under the "Working Spaces" section you want to select "sRGB IEC61966-2.1" in the drop down menu next to RGB. Next, in the "Color Management Policies" section, select "Convert to Working RGB" in the drop down menu next to RGB. In the same section there are three check boxes. You want to check all three. At this point you can save your settings, which is a good idea in case they ever get reset to the defaults. Give the settings a filename like; sRGB-for-lab. You can then type in a description which will appear in the description section of the Color Settings dialogue box. I recommend a description like, For lab printing purposes, or something along those lines. Now click OK and you're done.

So what exactly did you just do? Well, every time you open up an image that is not in the sRGB color space, you will be prompted to convert it to the working RGB, which you set up to be sRGB. Still confused? There is a video tutorial of this article to help you out visually.

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