Out of Gamut: Setting Up Color Management in Photoshop 6

Bruce Fraser

Making Policy
Once you’ve tamed your monitor, you can proceed to configuring Photoshop’s color management. In older versions of Photoshop you had to visit several dialog boxes to do so, but in Photoshop 6, the basic settings are all contained in one scary-looking überdialog, Color Settings, which you can find on the Edit menu.

Photoshop 6 presents all its basic color-management settings in one Color Settings dialog.

Let’s leave aside the choice of profiles for RGB, CMYK, Gray, and Spot working spaces for the time being. The really important settings are in the Color Management Policies section of the dialog. These policies control how Photoshop behaves when it encounters profiles (or fails to do so). They also dictate just how important the other choices in the dialog will be.
Photoshop lets you set one of three policies -– Off, Convert to Working RGB, and Preserve Embedded Profiles — separately for RGB, CMYK, and Gray. Let’s look at what each policy does.
Off: “Off” is really a misnomer for this policy, because you can’t turn color management completely off in Photoshop 6. For one thing, Photoshop 6 always displays color through your monitor profile. For another, when you ask Photoshop to convert an image from one mode to another — RGB to CMYK, for example — it has to make some assumption about the colors represented by RGB and CMYK numbers so that it can convert from one to the other.
A less-misleading rubric would be “behave like Photoshop 4,” but that would doubtless have been less comforting to users who have concluded that color management is so scary and confusing that they just want it to go away. If you’ve read thus far, we assume you aren’t one of them.
Here’s what the Off policy really does:

• When Photoshop encounters an image with an embedded profile that differs from the working space you set for the image’s color mode (RGB, CMYK, or Gray), it discards the embedded profile and treats the image as being in the color mode’s working space. This pretty much guarantees that the colors display incorrectly. When you save the image, Photoshop doesn’t embed a profile, so the actual colors the numbers in the image are supposed to represent become lost.
• When Photoshop encounters an image with an embedded profile that’s the same as the working space set for the image’s color mode, it preserves the profile. When you save the image, Photoshop embeds the working space profile. This at least gives downstream color-savvy applications and users a clue that the numbers in the image belong to Adobe RGB (1998), for example.

Ultimately, then, if you choose Off as your policy, the role of the working space becomes paramount, because everything will be interpreted as being in that working space. Workflows do exist that would benefit from this policy, but if you’re trying to get a handle on managing color with Photoshop, the Off policy is not a good place to start.
Convert to Working RGB: Unlike “Off,” this policy does what it says. When Photoshop encounters an image with an embedded profile that differs from the working space profile you set for the image’s color mode, it converts the image from the embedded profile’s space to the working space. The numbers in the image change, but the color appearance is preserved. When you save images, the working space profile gets embedded. You can think of this option as “behave like Photoshop 5/5.5,” in that each color mode has only one working space, and every image gets converted to that working space.
This policy too fits some workflows well, but again it probably isn’t the best place to start when you’re trying to understand exactly what’s going on with color, because it makes Photoshop do things to the color automatically, without any file-specific instructions on your part.
Preserve Embedded Profiles: When you set the policy to Preserve Embedded Profiles, Photoshop keeps each image in the color space dictated by the embedded profile. The numbers in the document stay unchanged, and the colors are displayed correctly. In effect, the embedded profile space becomes the working space for that document. This “per-document” approach to color might at first glance seem like a recipe for chaos, but Photoshop offers some easy ways to keep track of each image’s space, and it puts you fully in control. It also reduces the role of working spaces to one of convenience rather than necessity.
The main benefit of Preserve Embedded Profiles is that it gives you a chance to evaluate the image before you decide whether or not to make any conversions, preserving both the numbers in the document and the color appearance those numbers represent. As such, it’s by far the safest choice. You can always elect to treat an image as the other policies would — discarding the embedded profile, or converting the image to your working space — but at least you get to see it first. So unless and until you’re sure that the automatic behavior of one of the other policies will work for you, “Preserve Embedded Profiles” is the safest starting point.

With the Off policy in effect, this image appears dark and oversaturated, because the color numbers were misrepresented. The image was in ColorMatch RGB while the working space was set to Adobe RGB.

Convert to Working produces the correct appearance for the image. As the info palette shows, the RGB numbers have changed because of the conversion.

With the Preserve Embedded Profiles policy, the underlying numbers stay the same as with the Off policy, but the image is interpreted correctly as being in Colormatch RGB.

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