Speed Up Your Workflow with Photoshop Actions
As you gain experience with your own workflow, you will find that there are certain sequences of Photoshop steps that you perform time and time again. In order to automate repeated tasks, Photoshop includes the Actions panel that allows you to record and save sequences of steps. You can save multiple actions in sets that cover certain aspects of your work you could, for example, have a set called frames, for your picture frame actions . The Actions panel in figure 4-72 shows the open action set...
What is a Color Management System
A color management system CMS is a set of program modules that mediate color translation between different devices. These modules are often part of a computer's operating system, and they are usually provided by software manufacturers. If an application is used to display, edit, or print a color image, it initiates the appropriate function s , such as displaying an image or generating the correct ICC profile information, and then tells the CMS what function should be performed. The central part...
The Digital Light Box
Sorting your images is an important and often unpopular task, especially if you are itching to get to work on your latest images. The thumbnails displayed in many file browsers are usually not of high enough quality to be used for judging overall image quality. The fact that we will be working mostly with RAW files means that our digital light box has to have an associated or built-in RAW editor that can display the full, high-resolution image contained in the RAW data. When you are sorting...
Setting your Monitor profile
Photoshop is not particularly intuitive when it comes to finding the current monitor profile. The following methods are the simplest that we know Windows XP Right-click on the desktop and select Properties. Select the Settings tab in the dialog that appears and click the Advanced button. Selecting the Color Management tab then displays a dialog containing all installed monitor profiles. The currently active profile is highlighted see figure 3-29 for the Windows XP version . Here, you can add...
Color Temperature and Hue
You can manipulate color temperature at various stages by using your RAW editor or the camera's white balance settings. The term color temperature defines the composition of the light at a device's white point i.e., the composition of light emitted by an ideal light source at a specific temperature and is stated in Kelvin units K . Contrary to our normal color perception, the higher the color temperature of a light source, the more blue components it will have. Conversely, the lower a light's...
Profiling Your Printer
Most printer profiling packages offer several different print targets. The more color fields a target provides, the more precise your profile will be. However, this also involves more effort. Some profiling devices such as DTP-41, DTP-70, or iliO by X-Rite 52 can read printed targets automatically, but these are usually prohibitively expensive for most photographers. A standard spectrophotometer and ruler like those provided with the ilXTrme kit by X-Rite is usually sufficient for producing...
Gamut Warning
O xOl. QM amp J gt 94S .Hunintingbird.TIF .1 24,2 KC S U.S. WeL CuhL lI tSWOP v2 O xOl. QM amp J gt 94S .Hunintingbird.TIF .1 24,2 KC S U.S. WeL CuhL lI tSWOP v2 Image displayed with Gamut warning active. is set up as the warning color and U.S. Web Coated SWOP V2 as the destination profile. Image displayed with Gamut warning active. is set up as the warning color and U.S. Web Coated SWOP V2 as the destination profile. If you don't use a custom proof setup in Photoshop and activate Gamut Warning...
The CMYK Color Model
The CMYK color model uses four primary colors to define a color cyan C , magenta M , yellow Y , and black K . CMYK was designed for printing, where incoming light is reflected by the print. CMYK is a subtractive color model, as each of the colored inks absorbs subtracts a certain component of the incident light. Figure 3-3 shows that mixing cyan and magenta gives you blue, and when you add magenta to yellow you get red. In theory, the combination of the colors C, M, and Y alone should be...
Visualizing Color Spaces
Color spaces are actually three-dimensional. The profile shown in figure 3-7 is sRGB, illustrated using the Color-Sync utility in Mac OS X. Windows XP has a similar utility, called MS Color Control Panel, that is available for free download 97 . In figure 3-7, the gray shape shows the Adobe RGB 1998 gamut as a comparison. The printing industry also uses 2D charts to display color spaces. The color space plot shown in figure 3-8 was generated using the X-Rite ProfileMaker Pro Profile Editor. BC...
RAW JPEG and TIFF Processing
Compress to mini JPEG and save as RAW file Download image files to computer, rename and tag Interpolate color resample with new white balance Interpolate color resample with new white balance Reduce to 8-bit color depth and convert color space Download image files to computer, renaming tagging Figure 2-6 Comparison of a RAW and a JPEG TIFF workflow. The RAW workflow generally comprises fewer Photoshop optimization steps than the illustration infers, but the borders between the two processing...
Our File and Folder Naming Conventions
Figure 1-24 illustrates the system we use for naming files and folders. This system is chronological and is built on two or three levels. We use one folder for each year, and the folder's name always includes the year. The year folders contain subfolders organized according to shoots. If we use only one camera, all the images from a shoot are stored in a single subfolder. If we use multiple cameras for a shoot, the images from each camera are stored in a separate subfolder. Our system for...
Using Histograms as an Exposure Aid
Correct exposure is the key to great photos. Overexposure should be avoided at all costs, as washed-out highlight detail cannot be recovered at any stage during the workflow. In order to help you judge exposure, digital cameras allow you to check your exposure visually on the monitor immediately after shooting. Nearly all digital cameras - at least all DSLR cameras - have a histogram display that shows the distribution of tonal values within the image from 0 black, on the left to 255 white, on...