Producing consistent color from inkjet printers: Tutorial

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Producing consistent color from inkjet printers

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Color management lets you control the color that Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0 prints to inkjet printers. This system of components and settings gives you accurate color when you use those components and settings consistently. The key is to use a custom printer profile that knows how your specific inkjet printer produces color. In this tutorial we'll show you how to use your custom printer profile to enable inkjet printing to work consistently. Some companies in North America that create custom profiles are Profile City (www.profilecity.com), Inkjet Mall (www.inkjetmall.com), and Chromix (www.chromix.com). For the complete story about color management, see Real World Adobe Photoshop 7.

Create a profile for your monitor.

Create a monitor profile using Adobe Gamma in Windows, ColorSync in Mac OS 9.x, the Display Calibrator Assistant in Mac OS X, or a hardware-based calibrator.

Your monitor profile describes the behavior of your monitor so that Photoshop can display color accurately. For assistance creating the profile in Windows, see "Creating an ICC monitor profile" in Photoshop Help. In Mac OS, see Mac Help

Set Photoshop color defaults.

Choose how Photoshop reacts to the profiles embedded in the images you open: Choose Edit > Color Settings (or Photoshop > Color Settings in Mac OS X). Choose Adobe RGB (1998) from the RGB pop-up menu in the Working Spaces section. Choose Preserve Embedded Profiles from the RGB pop-up menu in the Color Management Policies section, and then select Ask When Opening for both Profile Mismatches and Missing Profiles.

The options that Photoshop displays when you open an image depend on what you choose in the Policies section of the Color Settings dialog box. When you choose Preserve Embedded Profiles, Photoshop keeps the embedded profile if it differs from your working space profile (Adobe RGB (1998)). Ask When Opening allows you to change which profile is assigned to each image that doesn't contain your previously selected working space profile. If you primarily open images from a camera or scanner that embeds a profile, you may want to use the embedded profile instead of the working profile you've selected for Photoshop.

Save your profile into your image.

When you save an image, choose File > Save As, and select ICC Profile: [custom profile] (Windows) or Embed Color Profile: [custom profile] (Mac OS) in the Color section.

Saving a profile embeds it in your image, allowing other applications that use color management to read and use that profile in their color management workflow.


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