Page 132 - Graphic Design and Print Production Fundamentals

120 Chapter 4. Colour Management in the Graphic Technologies
for generic work. Be aware that choosing SWOP will constrain the gamut to the capability of a web
offset print condition.

The list of profiles available for selection comes from the various ColorSync aware folders that we
have previously discussed. Priority is given to profiles in the Library/Application Support/Adobe/Color/
Profiles/Recommended folder, and these profiles are listed first. If you have a profile that you wish to
give prominence to for selection, place it in this folder.

The Color Management Policies subsection controls behaviour when opening or creating documents and
when moving objects between documents. There are three options for each of the available colour space
settings: Off, Preserve Embedded, or Convert to Working.

The choice of Off is the most misleading, because we can’t actually turn colour management off: there
is always an assumed profile if no other information is presented. With Off, copy and paste of an object
moves tint values: a 50% cyan value from the originating document lands as 50% cyan in the destination
document.

Preserve Embedded does what it says and maintains what’s in place. New documents use the Working
Space profile and become tagged. An untagged file assumes the working space profile but stays
untagged. If you copy and paste native RGB objects, they are converted. If you copy and paste native
CMYK objects, the tint values are maintained.

Our final choice for colour management policy is potentially the most dangerous. Convert to Working
converts tagged documents using the existing profile as a source profile and the Working Space profile as
the destination. If you do not have the Alert check boxes ticked, this can happen without your awareness.
For an untagged document, it assumes the Working Space profile. Copy and pasting RGB or CMYK
objects always converts to preserve appearance (changes the tint values).

After reviewing the choices, the recommendation for Color Management Policies is Preserve Embedded,
and make sure all Alert boxes are checked. This allows you to confirm that any action is what you
actually want before proceeding.

The last section of the Color Settings dialog window is the Conversion Options. The Engine option refers
to the colour management module (CMM) that will be used for calculations in the colour conversions.
The default choice of the Adobe Color Engine is good for maintaining consistency. Here we have as
well the Rendering Intent entry, which will function as a default unless an alternate intent is specified
in any dialog. Relative Colorimetric is a reasonable choice unless you know that almost all of your
conversions will be RGB to CMYK for which Perceptual is the appropriate intent option. Always check
Use Black Point Compensation. This maps the black point source to the black point destination, avoiding
any clipping or flattening of the darkest colours and maintains the full dynamic range.

Now that we have all of our working parameters correctly defined, we can OK the Color Settings dialog
and look at the basic mechanism for using colour profiles in the Adobe Creative applications. There are
two actions we can invoke from the Edit menu to apply colour profiles: Assign Profile and Convert to
Profile.

Assign Profile allows us to select a source profile for the open document. This action will replace the
existing profile for a tagged document or provide a new reference for an untagged file. To have the