Photoshop 6 for Windows Bible- P26 potx

Then I click the Color button to display the scrolling list of ColorSync Profile options shown on the right side of Figure 16-2.. Figure 16-2: On the Mac, choose the Monitors control pan

Figure 15-28: I managed to transform a strange, drab

composition into this mighty attractive poster art using

nothing but text

Figure 15-29: Creating the Jelly-Vision logo was as

simple as distorting the text and applying a Pillow

Emboss layer effect

Layer effects bonanza

You’ll have a blast experimenting with layer effects and type Layer effects are fast,flexible, easy to use, and they were designed largely with editable type in mind.Sure, they get overused But as with any cool feature, you can stay ahead of thecurve by applying your effects creatively

Figure 15-30 shows three very simple but unusual implementations of layer effects.All three effects rely on character masks, but I created these selection outlines

using standard type layers I clicked with the type tool, entered the words Shake,

Murder, and Imprint, and then formatted them Then I Ctrl-clicked on the layer to

draw out the selection outlines as I needed them

Why use a standard type layer to create selection outlines instead of the type maskoption? Simple — because type on a layer is forever editable; a type mask is not.Editing type on a layer doesn’t affect an existing character mask, but I can Ctrl-click

to generate new masks any time I like The upshot is that a type layer serves doubleduty — to create both editable text and type masks This one tool does everythingyou need, which is why I for one never change type tools; I always work with lay-ered type

Figure 15-30: Three examples of childishly simple layer effects

applied creatively to character masks

Tip

That’s really the key to creating cool effects The rest is just “scribbling and

bib-bling” as a dramatized Mozart once said But because the scribbles and bibbles

may prove of minor interest to you, here’s how I made each effect:

✦ Shake: First, the boring stuff I extracted the layer mask for the word Shake by

Ctrl-clicking on my type layer and Shift+Alt-dragging around the word Shake

with the rectangular marquee tool to deselect Murder and Imprint Then I

switched to the background layer and pressed Ctrl+J to send Shake to an

inde-pendent layer Finally I pressed the / key to lock the transparent pixels so I

could edit the type and only the type

Now for the fun stuff I created a pattern from the embossed texture back in

Figure 15-4 using Edit ➪ Define Pattern Then I used Edit ➪ Fill to fill Shake with

the pattern After double-clicking the new layer name to open the Layer Style

dialog box, I applied a black drop shadow, setting the blend mode to Multiply,

the opacity to 100 percent, and the angle to 45 degrees Next I applied a white

Inner Shadow, setting the blend mode to Screen, opacity to 85 percent, and

angle to –135 degrees The upshot is that the drop shadow darkens the

back-ground and the inner shadow lightens the characters

✦ Murder: I filled the background layer behind the word Murder with black.

Then I did all the boring stuff that I mentioned two paragraphs ago —

Ctrl-clicked the type layer, intersected Murder with the marquee tool, pressed

Ctrl+J to send Murder to its own layer, and pressed / to lock the transparent

pixels

I set the foreground color to white and brushed across the Murder layer with

the paintbrush set to 40 percent opacity Because the transparency of the layer

was locked, I painted inside the letters only Finally, I opened the Layer Style

dialog box and applied a white drop shadow to the text layer, setting the blend

mode to Screen and the Angle value to –126 The result is a directional glow

✦ Imprint: Here I filled the area behind Imprint with the same pattern I defined

for Shake, and then I mushed the pattern together using the filters Noise ➪

Median and Blur ➪ Gaussian Blur (both explained in Chapter 10) Then, as

usual, I did the boring stuff — Ctrl-clicked on the original type layer,

inter-sected Imprint with the marquee tool, and pressed Ctrl+J and the / key

With Imprint on its own layer, I double-clicked the layer name to open the

Layer Style dialog box and applied the Bevel and Emboss effect using the

Emboss effect style The result was a bit disappointing Muted and dark, it

didn’t have the punch I wanted To brighten it up, I duplicated the Imprint

layer by dragging it onto the page icon at the bottom of the Layers palette

Then I pressed Shift+Alt+S to apply the Screen mode The final result is the

much sharper effect you see in Figure 15-30

Essential Color

Management

Plunging Headlong into Color

Most artists react very warmly to the word color and a bit

more coolly to the word management, especially those of us

who have made the mistake of taking on managerial chores

ourselves Put the two words together, however, and you can

clear a room The term color management has been known to

cause the sturdiest of characters to shriek and sweat like a

herd of elephants locked in a sauna

It’s no exaggeration to say that color management is the

least understood topic in all of computer imaging From my

experience talking to Photoshop users, most folks expect to

calibrate their monitors and achieve reliable if not perfect

color But in point of fact, there’s no such thing So-called

device-dependent color — that is, synthetic color produced by

a piece of hardware — is a moving target The best Photoshop

or any other piece of software can do is to convert from one

target to the next

For what it’s worth, most consumer monitors (and video

boards, for that matter) are beyond calibration, in the strict

sense of the word You can try your hand at using a hardware

calibrator — one of those devices where you plop a little

suc-tion cup onto your screen But calibrators often have less to

do with changing screen colors than identifying them Even if

your monitor permits prepress-quality calibration — as in the

case of $3,000 devices sold by different vendors over the

years, including Radius, Mitsubishi, and LaCie — it’s not

enough to simply correct the colors on screen; you also

have to tell Photoshop what you’ve done

16

In This Chapter

Setting up yourmonitor with theGamma WizardSelecting an RGBworking spaceEmbedding a colorprofile in a savedimage

Converting colorsfrom one workingspace to anotherUsing the ColorSettings commandAssigning profiles tountagged imagesEstablishing colormanagement policiesReacting to anddisabling alertmessagesChanging the Intentsetting

Setting up a customCMYK spaceTransferring CMYKsettings fromPhotoshop 5

Therefore, color management is first and foremost about identifying your monitor.You have to explain your screen’s foibles to Photoshop so that it can make everyattempt to account for them In the old days, Photoshop used the screen data tocalculate CMYK conversions and that was it Photoshop 5 went two steps farther,

embedding a profile that identifies the source of the image and using this

informa-tion to translate colors from one monitor to another Photoshop 6 goes a couple ofsteps farther still, permitting you to work in multiple profile-specific color spaces atthe same time — great for artists who alternatively create images for print and theWeb — and specify exactly what to do with images that lack profiles

The new Color Settings command is both wonderful and bewildering It can just aseasily mess up colors as fix them But if you read this chapter, you and your colorsshould be able to ride the currents safely from one digital destination to the next Andbest of all, color management in Photoshop 6 is consistent with color managementfound in Illustrator 9 and future Adobe applications Learn one and the others make

a heck of a lot more sense

A Typical Color-Matching Scenario

Photoshop 6 devotes three features to color management The first is the AdobeGamma control panel, which characterizes your monitor Choose Settings from theStart menu, and then choose Control Panel After the Control Panel window comes

up, double-click the Adobe Gamma icon The second feature is Edit ➪ Color Settings.Choose this command or press Ctrl+Shift+K to display the Color Settings dialog box,which lets you edit device-dependent color spaces and decide what to do with pro-file mismatches Finally, use File ➪ Save As to decide whether to embed a profile into a saved image or include no profile at all

I could explain each of these features independently and leave it up to you to putthem together But peering into every tree is not always the best way to understandthe forest So rather than explaining so much as a single option, I begin our tour ofcolor management by showing the various control panels, commands, and options

in action In this introductory scenario, I take an RGB image I’ve created on my Macand open it up on my PC The Mac is equipped with a PressView 21SR and the PC ishooked up to a generic Sony Trinitron screen, so I’ve got both extremes pretty wellcovered Yet despite the change of platforms and the even more dramatic change

in monitors, Photoshop maintains a high degree of consistency so the image looksthe same on both sides of the divide While the specifics of setting up your systemobviously vary, this walk-through should give you an idea of how color management

in Photoshop works

If you’re well-versed in Photoshop 5 and you already have a rough idea of how profile-based color management works, skip ahead to the section “Color ConversionCentral.” There I explain the intricacies of the Color Settings dialog box, which iswhere the vast majority of the color management process occurs

Setting up the source monitor

If you own a monitor with calibration capabilities, I recommend that you start off

by calibrating it In the case of the PressView, I launch a utility called ProSense that

works with the hardware calibrator to both adjust screen colors and save screen

profiles in a variety of formats For purposes of Photoshop for the Mac, the most

important format is ColorSync, which is Apple’s system-wide color management

extension I also save a Photoshop Monitor File version of the profile, as shown

in Figure 16-1

Figure 16-1: When calibrating my PressView monitor, I direct the

ProSense utility to save a ColorSync and Photoshop Monitor File version

of the screen profile

The next step is to assign the profile to the monitor I choose Apple ➪ Control

Panels ➪ Monitors Then I click the Color button to display the scrolling list of

ColorSync Profile options shown on the right side of Figure 16-2 The PressView

21sr item turns out to be the profile I just created with the ProSense utility

I select it and move on

Figure 16-2: On the Mac, choose the Monitors control panel and click the Color button

(left) to load a monitor profile that will automatically work with Photoshop

The Gamma control panel

“Swell,” I can hear you say, “But what do those of us with more down-to-earth monitors do?” For everyday people, Photoshop ships with the Adobe Gamma control panel Choose Start ➪ Settings ➪ Control Panel to bring up the Control Panel window Then double-click the Adobe Gamma icon (If the control panel displays a warning that your video card doesn’t support system-wide color management, don’t sweat it Most video cards don’t.) Select the Step By Step(Wizard) option and click the Next button to walk through the setup process one step at a time If you see a control panel like the one on the right side of Figure 16-3, click the Wizard button to continue

When using the Adobe Gamma Wizard, all you have to do is answer questions and click the Next button to advance from one screen to another For example, after adjusting the contrast and brightness settings, Gamma asks you to specify the nature of your screen’s red, green, and blue phosphors If you own a Trinitron

or Diamondtron monitor — which you’ll know because you paid more for it — selectthe Trinitron settings Or select Custom and enter values according to your moni-tor’s documentation If the documentation does not suggest settings, ignore thisscreen and click Next to move on So you don’t know your phosphors — that’s life.You’ve got bigger fish to fry

The next screen, pictured in Figure 16-4, is the most important It asks you to balance the red, green, and blue display functions of your monitor But to do so,

you need to turn off the View Single Gamma Only check box; this presents you with

separate controls over each of the three monitor channels Then use the sliders to

make the inner squares match the outer borders You are in essence calibrating the

monitor according to your unique perceptions of it, making this particular brand of

characterization a highly personal one

Figure 16-3: Select the Step By Step option (left) or click the Wizard button to

advance one step at a time through the monitor setup process

Figure 16-4: Turn off the View Single Gamma Only check box to

modify each of the three color channels independently

The next screen asks you to set the white point, which defines the general colorcast of your screen from 5,000 degrees Kelvin for slightly red to 9,300 degrees forslightly blue A medium value of 6,500 degrees is a happy “daylight” medium Tofind the best setting for your monitor, click the Measure button Then click the gray box that appears the most neutral — neither too warm nor too cool — until you get dumped back into the Gamma Wizard Then click Next.

When you click the Finish button, the Gamma utility asks you to name your newmonitor profile and save it to disk Name it whatever you want, but don’t changethe location — it has to go into the Color folder inside the System or System 32folder to be made available to Photoshop and other applications

Adobe Gamma generates a custom monitor profile and automatically alertsPhotoshop to the change You don’t even have to bring up the ColorSync controlpanel (though you may want to just to confirm) Your screen may not look any different than it did before you opened Gamma, but you can rest assured thatPhotoshop is now officially aware of its capabilities and limitations

Incidentally, the term gamma refers to the amount of correction required to convert the color signal generated inside the monitor (let’s call it x) to the color display that you see on screen ( y) Imagine a simple graph with the input signal x along the bot- tom and the output y along the side A gamma of 1.0 would result in a diagonal line

from bottom-left to upper-right corner A higher gamma value tugs at the center ofthat line and curves it upward As you tug, more and more of the curve is taken up

by darker values, resulting in a darker display So a typical Mac screen with defaultgamma of 1.8 is lighter than a typical PC screen with a default gamma of 2.2 For areal-time display of gamma in action, check out the discussion of the Curves dialogbox included in Chapter 17

Selecting the ideal working space

Now that I’ve identified my monitor, I need to select an RGB working environment,

which is a color space other than the one identified for the monitor This is thestrangest step, but it’s one of the most important as well Fortunately, all it requires is a bit of imagination to understand fully

On my Mac, I switch to Photoshop and choose Edit ➪ Color Settings Photoshop displays the dialog box shown in Figure 16-5 I’m immediately faced with a dizzyingarray of options — no gradual immersion into the world of color management here —but Photoshop does make a small attempt to simplify the process The programoffers several collections of predefined settings via the Settings pop-up menu Among the settings are Color Management Off, which deactivates Photoshop’s color management entirely; ColorSync Workflow, which is useful in all-Macintoshenvironments; and Emulate Photoshop 4, which both turns color management off and mimics Version 4’s screen display

Note

Figure 16-5: I choose U.S Prepress Defaults to access the Adobe RGB

(1998) color space, which affords me a large theoretical RGB spectrum

Each of these options has its relative advantages in certain settings, but most folks

will want to gravitate toward two other options If you create most of your images

for the Web, select the Web Graphics Defaults option This directs Photoshop’s color

functions so that they’re most amenable to screen display On the other hand, if

most of your artwork finds its way into print, and if you live in the United States or

some country that supports U.S printing standards, select U.S Prepress Defaults

For my part, I select U.S Prepress Defaults, as shown in Figure 16-5 If you have

any doubts about whether to favor Web or print graphics, I recommend you do the

same Why? Among its other attractions, the U.S Prepress option sets the working

RGB color space to Adobe RGB (1998), arguably the best environment for viewing

24-bit images on screen

Adobe RGB includes a wide range of theoretical RGB colors, whether they can truly

be displayed on a monitor or not You may see some clipping on screen — where

two or more color spaces appear as one — but Photoshop has greater latitude

when interpolating and calculating colors

After selecting U.S Prepress Defaults, I click the OK button The source environment

is fully prepared Now to save an image and send it on its way

Embedding the profile

The final step on the Mac side is to embed the Adobe RGB profile into a test image

(The word embed simply means that Photoshop adds a little bit of code to the file

stating where it was last edited.) For this, I choose File ➪ Save As, which displaysthe dialog box in Figure 16-6 After naming the file and specifying a location on disk,

I select the Embed Color Profile check box, which embeds the Adobe RGB colorprofile into the test image Then I click the Save button to save the file

Figure 16-6: I select the Embed Color Profile check box to append the

Adobe RGB profile to the image saved on the Mac

In order to save a profile with an image, you have to select a file format that

sup-ports profiles This includes the native Photoshop (PSD) format, TIFF, JPEG, EPS,

and PICT The two DCS formats also save profiles, but because DCS supports CMYK

images only, it converts the RGB image to CMYK and saves a CMYK profile If you

select another format — GIF, PNG, BMP, or the like — the Embed Color Profile check

box becomes dimmed

Note that the Embed Color Profile check box always embeds the device-independent

profile defined in the Color Settings dialog box This is very important — it does not

embed the monitor profile Photoshop handles the conversion from monitor space

to RGB space internally, without the help of either the Color Settings or Save As

commands This permits Photoshop to accommodate a world of different monitors

from a single RGB working space

Setting up the destination space

After saving the test image with the embedded Adobe RGB profile, I copy it from my

Mac to my PC (an Intergraph ExtremeZ equipped with Windows NT) via Miramar’s

PC MacLAN networking software But I could just as easily use a different network

protocol or even e-mail it from my Mac and download it to my PC No translation

occurs here; this is a simple file copy from one computer to another

Now before I can open this image and display it properly on my PC, I have to set up

my RGB colors I start by characterizing my monitor This time I’m using a no-frills,

consumer-grade Sony monitor, so I have to perform the calibration using the Adobe

Gamma Wizard, as discussed previously in the section “The Gamma control panel.”

After I finish with Adobe Gamma, I go into Photoshop and choose Edit ➪ Color

Settings or press Ctrl+Shift+K, just as I did on the Mac Now if I were really trying

to calibrate my systems to match up, I would select U.S Prepress Defaults from the

Settings pop-up menu, just as I did on the Mac But for purposes of this

demonstra-tion, I want to force Photoshop to perform a conversion, and a good conversion

requires a little dissension So this time around, I put on my Web artist cap and

choose Web Graphics Defaults from the Settings option, as shown in Figure 16-7

This sets the RGB Working Spaces pop-up menu to the utterly indecipherable

sRGB IEC and so on and so on

The truncated name for this working space is sRGB, short for standard RGB, the

ubiquitous monitor space touted by Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and a host of

oth-ers Although much smaller and drabber than Adobe RGB, the sRGB space is perfect

for Web graphics because it represents the colors projected by a run-of-the-mill PC

monitor It also happens to be Photoshop’s default setting Given that many users

will never visit this dialog box, sRGB is fast becoming a cross-platform standard

Note

Caution

Figure 16-7: On the Windows side, I select Web Graphics Defaults to

set my working environment to sRGB This forces Photoshop to make

a conversion

Defining color management policies

The Color Settings command determines not only how Photoshop projects images

on screen, but also how it reads embedded profiles The three Color ManagementPolicies pop-up menus determine how Photoshop reacts when it tries to open animage whose embedded profiles don’t match the active color settings When WebGraphics Defaults is active, the RGB pop-up menu is set to Off, which tells Photoshop

to resist managing colors when it opens an RGB image Personally, I’m not a big fan

of disabling color management entirely, especially when it threatens to ruin my colorconversion scenario So I set the option to Convert to Working RGB, as shown inFigure 16-8

Finally, Photoshop wants to know how it should behave when it encounters animage garnishing a profile other than sRGB Should it convert all colors in the image to the sRGB environment? Or should it ask permission before proceeding.Personally, I like my software to be subservient, so I select Ask When Opening from the Profile Mismatches options, as in Figure 16-8

Figure 16-8: Set the first of the Color Management Policies to Convert to

Working RGB to convert the image from the Adobe RGB working space

to the sRGB space

Converting the color space

Now I’m ready to open the test image I choose File ➪ Open just as I normally would

As Photoshop for Windows opens the test image, it detects the embedded Adobe

RGB profile and determines that it does not match the active sRGB profile Justly

troubled by this development, Photoshop displays the alert box shown in Figure

16-9 You can select from three conversion options:

✦ Use the embedded profile: Photoshop 6 is perfectly capable of displaying

multiple images at a time, each in a different color space Select this option

to tell Photoshop to use the Adobe RGB space instead of sRGB to display

the image it’s about to open No colors are converted in the process

✦ Convert document’s colors to the working space: This option converts the

colors from the Adobe RGB space to sRGB Because I selected Convert to

Working RGB in the previous step, this option is selected by default Had I

not selected the Ask When Opening check box, Photoshop would have

performed the conversion without asking me