From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Choosing a color space - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Choosing a color space

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- [Instructor] In a perfect world, all of our devices are printers and monitors and screens on our phones would all be able to display or print all of the colors that the human eye can see, but they can't. In fact, not only does each device display a subset of colors, different devices display different subsets of color. Or to put it another way, if we think of a device as being able to represent a certain number of crayons, then different devices not only have different numbers of crayons, so some might have 12, while others have 20. They also have different colored crayons. So one might have three blues and two greens, while the other has only two blues, but six greens. There are many reasons that different devices display different colors. Take a screen, for example. It uses an additive process to represent color, where adding equal parts of red, blue, and green light produces white. While printing technology uses a subtractive process to represent color, where adding together cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink creates black. Another reason for this difference is that not all screens nor all printing technologies are created equally. Manufacturers use different materials of different quality to meet the needs of different consumers. So keeping in mind that different devices display different colors, we need to figure out how many colors we need to work with when we're creating and editing our images in Photoshop, so that they will contain all of the colors that we want to show across all the devices that we're outputting them to. In order to do so, we're going to take a look at four different color spaces in Photoshop, SRGB, Adobe RGB, ProPhoto, and CMYK. Now, imagine that the color shape, the horseshoe on the left represents all of the colors visible to the human eye. Of course it doesn't, but conceptually it will give us an idea of the relationship between these four color spaces. So the triangle represents the SRGB color space, and it's a relatively small color space in comparison to the color gamut of the human eye. Most monitors and screens can display all of the colors in the SRGB color space. So it may be a great color space to work in if you know that you're only going to publish the screen. But SRGB isn't typically the best color space for editing images because most images that are captured by digital cameras contain far more colors than are in the SRGB color space. Therefore, if you convert to and work in the SRGB color space, most likely you're discarding a significant number of colors in the image, and with fewer colors, we don't have the latitude to make large color and tonal edits to the file without negatively impacting the quality of the image. So that takes us to the Adobe RGB color space. This is a larger color space than SRGB and most high quality monitors and screens can display all of the colors in Adobe RGB. It's the most popular color space because of the latitude it has when making edits and almost the entire Adobe RGB color gamut can be printed by inkjet printers, especially those with four or more color inks. The only drawback to working in a larger color space is when we do need to convert our images down to the SRGB smaller color space to publish on screen, there might be shifts in some colors as the image is reduced down into that smaller color space. Now when we look at ProPhoto, we can see that it's even larger than Adobe RGB, and many people, especially photographers, work in ProPhoto to take advantage of that higher quality color information while they're processing or making edits to their files. However, because the color space is so large, there are times when you might not be able to accurately see all of the colors on your screen, which may lead to surprises such as color shifts and banding when converting to a smaller color space from ProPhoto. Finally, when we look at the CMYK color space, which is the color space used to output images to a conventional printing press, we can see that the color space is quite limited. Now, in the past, some designers have actually worked in the CMYK color space because they knew that their work was only going to be output to a printing press. But today, since much of the content we create is repurposed for display, both in print and on screen, I would suggest that you work in a larger color space such as Adobe RGB or ProPhoto, and then convert to the CMYK color space when ready to print and convert to SRGB when posting online. All right, let's move to Photoshop. To set your color space in Photoshop, we can choose edit and then color settings. So the default is SRGB, but we can select a different color space from the list. If you are a photographer, then you might want to choose ProPhoto or Adobe RGB, or if you're designing only for screen, then you might want to choose SRGB. For now, I'll choose Adobe RGB. You'll want to choose the color space that makes the most sense for your workflow. Or you can leave that as SRGB because if we look in the color management policies, we can see that Photoshop is going to preserve the embedded profile, which means if you open a file into Photoshop that's already in another color space, it will remain in the color space that it was in. So for example, files from Lightroom Classic and Lightroom will open into the ProPhoto color space in Photoshop. Now in Lightroom Classic, you can change that in the preferences in external editing, and if you're starting in Bridge and editing in Camera Raw, then you can set the color space under Camera Raw's workflow settings, which I'll cover in depth in the Camera Raw chapter. You can also assign a profile to a document that doesn't have one using assign profile, and you can convert from one profile to another. Just one little warning when you are converting from one profile to another, Photoshop is going to have to flatten the layers if you have a multi-layered document. Excellent. So there we go. An overview of the four most common color spaces that you'll be working with in Photoshop.

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