And, so, you enter the bewildering world that is colour management. It’s confusing, and it’s taken two luminaries to explain bits of it to set up a system which I use. One of these being Heather K.
First off, your colour work flow must be logical and your image should gain a colour profile that matches your display pretty soon. Photoshop will want to use a profile to display your image on your screen.
So, step 1 - calibrate your display. No point going any further without a calibrated screen. Use a hardware device, not your eyes. You’ll get it wrong.
Next - set up your copy of Photoshop to use your screen profile. This is how mine’s been set up for years:
You will notice that the RGB space in Working Spaces is set to use my monitor’s own colour profile - that which was create when the screen was calibrated. Whenever I open an image, and the colour profiles mismatch, Photoshop will ask if I want to convert it, which I do.
OK, so Photoshop is set up. What you also need to do if you want to be totally thorough is to calibrate your printer and (if you have one) your scanner. More hardware needed. This is something I have not done. Usually this involves printing a test sheet, and scanning it back in. The calibration software works out how the colours shift and rebalances the system accordingly.
However, check your print dialogue in Photoshop as it has options for printing using PPD files for the printer and paper used. When printing something that matters, I let Photoshop colour manage the process, and select the paper being used. When the print information is sent to the OS print dialogue, I switch colour management off. You don’t want it to happen twice.
As you can imagine, colour management is complex, and there are companies out there who charge a lot to get your system set up right.
