Anyone who knows me or the books I’ve co-authored, such as Real World Photoshop CS2 or Real World InDesign CS2, knows that I’ve been a pretty staunch opponent to using sRGB in the Color Settings dialog box for any of the Creative Suite applications. I’ve also advocated making sure that you use the same setup in the Color Settings dialog boxes of all the Suite applications (so they’d be Synchronized). But that changed recently during a discussion with Real World Color Management co-author Chris Murphy.
As Chris pointed out, synchronizing the Suite applications just isn’t that important. Sure, we get to see a little “synchronized” icon (in CS2) that makes us feel good, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get accurate color when you want it.
My new advice is to set up Photoshop and Illustrator to the General Prepress settings. This sets the RGB working space to Adobe RGB and the CMYK working space to either SWOP or Euroscale Fogra (depending on where you are). It also turns on all the profile mismatch and missing profile checkboxes. I like this because:
- I want the default RGB working space to be Adobe RGB unless I specifically choose otherwise. sRGB is too narrow/constrained a working space for images that will end up in print, and it’s even too annoying for images that may be repurposed for the Web. (For Web images, I like editing in Adobe RGB and then converting to sRGB just before using Save for Web.) Note, however, that there’s no benefit in converting sRGB files to AdobeRGB upon opening them unless you’re going to actually edit the images in such a way that the colors may take advantage of AdobeRGB’s larger color space. That is, once an image is in sRGB the damage has been done. As my co-author Bruce Fraser is fond of saying, “You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.”
- I want the default CMYK to be SWOP or Euroscale, even though I’m probably going to use something else on an individual image-by-image basis. However, if you work in a predictable environment (such as a magazine that always prints on a particular printing press), you may want to get a custom CMYK profile for that press condition and use that as your default instead of SWOP. That will be a big step in taking you from middle-of-the-road color to really great color.
- Most of the time I want to be alerted to profile problems when I’m in those programs. (Actually, I spend very little time in Illustrator and virtually everything I create there is CMYK that I don’t want color managed, so I would be sorely tempted to simply turn off the Policy checkboxes in that program.)
However, in InDesign, I’m starting to use the General Purpose preset (instead of General Prepress). This turns off all those policy checkboxes, and — here’s where it gets wacky — specifies sRGB as the default RGB working space. Here’s why it makes sense:
- Granted, I don’t like the sRGB space, but if InDesign’s default working space is sRGB, then InDesign only assigns the sRGB space to colors in two instances:
- If you specify a color in InDesign as an RGB color. That’s pretty rare, as most colors should be specced as either CMYK or a Pantone spot color. In fact, the only time you’d likely specify a color as RGB is if you’re designing for the Web, but in that case, you probably want your RGB color to be based on sRGB anyway. So it’s all good.
- If you import an RGB image into InDesign that has no embedded profile. If the image has no profile, it probably means that you never opened and saved it from Photoshop, which means you probably got the image right off a Web site or directly from some digital camera that doesn’t embed profiles. In both these cases, sRGB is a safe bet for a color space. As Chris notes, “there are no untagged Adobe RGB images floating around in the world. There is a lot of untagged sRGB however.” So it’s all good.
- I very rarely need to see the profile mismatch and missing profile dialog boxes when opening InDesign documents. True, I wouldn’t know if someone sends me an InDesign document with different settings than mine, but I can always use Edit > Convert to Profile to see those settings and use Edit > Assign Profile to assign mine instead if I want to. (Remember that Convert to Profile actually changes color numbers, so a 100% cyan might get some magenta and yellow added in your Swatches palette if you convert to a different CMYK space. Assign Profile leaves all color numbers alone and simply changes their “meaning.”)
Using sRGB for InDesign’s default RGB working space just makes sense. Take a risk, and get unsynchronized!
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on June 28, 2006
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