General Photoshop color setup
From ColorWiki
The following are recommended settings for setting up Photoshop to handle the profiling of images.
Photoshop (CS4 & CS5)
Easy Setup (Recommended)
- Choose “North America Prepress 2”
from the menu at the top of the Color Settings dialog box. These are good all-around settings for any purpose.
Manual Setup
If you prefer to set things up manually, follow these steps:
- Select "more options."
- RGB: Select sRGB if you predominantly concentrate on Web work, otherwise we suggest Adobe RGB (1998) as the best all-around working space. It is big enough to contain most colors you may want to print.
- CMYK: Select your final output or proofing profile here. If you do not have a CMYK profile, we suggest “U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2”. For a larger CMYK working space, try “Coated GRACoL 2006”.
- Gray: leave as-is.
- Spot: leave as-is.
- Color Management Policies
- RGB: Preserve Embedded Profiles
- CMYK: Off (good for press-oriented environments where the destination of CMYK images is known to be one device or printing process. Embedding CMYK profiles in every file created can be space-consuming and is often unnecessary)
- Gray: Preserve Embedded Profiles
- Profile Mismatches: √ Ask When Opening, √ Ask When Pasting
- Missing Profiles: √ Ask When Opening
- Conversion Options
- Engine: Adobe (ACE) – choose another engine if you also want to perform conversions outside of Adobe products.
- Intent: Relative Colorimetric
- √ Use Black Point Compensation
- √ Use Dither
- √ Use Compensate for Scene-referred Profiles
On occasion, our instructions will mention using the “Convert to Profile” command which will override these settings. Other color selection commands do utilize these settings automatically and so they are worth setting up properly.
- Advanced Controls
- Desaturate Monitor Colors By: (leave unchecked)
- Blend RGB Colors Using Gamma: (leave unchecked)
Remember that the color settings are defaults, and may be manually overridden at any time. Note that choosing “Color Management Off” in this dialog does not mean you are not applying color management to your printer! This is a common misperception.