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Color Managements & Printing in Adobe Photoshop

Let's turn our attention to the topic of color management by color management. I mean, managing it. So when you have an image, you see it on your screen, you save it and you upload it to the internet or you give it to somebody else that they see something that is very similar to what you saw or if you print it, that what you get on the printer looks similar to what you got on the screen. Although with printing, sometimes your printer just isn't capable of reproducing all the colors you can see on your screen. So at least I want a preview on screen. What should I expect when it comes out of the printer before I commit ink to paper. And there's all sorts of details in Photoshop that has to do with color and making sure that you make, make it consistent between devices between um documents and many other things. And that whole process is known as color management and part of that is printing. So we'll look at the print dialogue box and how you would deal with the settings that are there. ...

So this is not a topic that I enjoy thinking about or talking about, but it's just necessary in order to get consistent color. So let's dive in see what you need to know. The first essential idea is that your computer screen is only capable of displaying three colors of light. And those colors happen to be red, green and blue. And every image starts out as being made out of a mixture of red, green and blue. And it's when you use it in differing amounts that you get all the colors. So down here at the bottom, let me see if I can demonstrate for you here, I simply have three pictures that are duplicates. They're exactly the same and there's nothing fancy about them and I happen to have a layer in there somewhere that has black on it. That's what you see out here. And what I'm gonna do is grab one of these layers and over in my layers panel, you, you don't need to reproduce this. By the way, I'm just showing you. So you know, it's not magic and that you could do it if you wanted to. So three identical pictures, black background in my layers panel with one of those images active. I'm gonna come up here and choose blending options and here it says uh what should this be made out of? And right now you can use all three colors of light, red, green and blue. Well, I want this one to only use red light. So I'm gonna turn off the green and turn off the blue. So now you can see that down there. This is literally made out of red light. Then I'll go to the middle one on my screen and I'm gonna do the same thing. But this time I'm gonna make it only use green and you might be able to guess what I'm gonna do the third, which is I'm gonna make it only display blue just by turning off some check boxes. So now you can see this image had red in it, this had green in it. This has blue in it. And now let's just move them so they overlap each other perfectly. And when I do, you're gonna see what it looks like when you combine blue and green together. And let's see if I can get these to line up, then I'm gonna come over here and grab the red one and I'm gonna pull it over and you should end up with the normal full color image and you can just as easily pull it back apart by accessing the various layers and pulling them apart. And that's all I'm doing when I demonstrate things like this little bar at the top and I pull it apart. So the takeaway there is every image you ever see on your computer screen is made out of only three colors of light, red, green and blue. And that's true of everything you see on screen. This over here is a certain mix of red, green and blue to produce this color. If you want Photoshop to show you that a little bit more blatantly, you have a couple of different places you can go to. If you went to the window menu and you chose info, then as you move over your image, you would see the amounts of red, green and blue that are used to make all the colors that are in your picture, whatever color you put your mouse on top of those numbers don't mean anything to most people. Uh But they can be useful. They are a precise description of a color. So if I were to call somebody on the phone and rattle off those numbers, they could click on their foreground color and type those numbers in right here for red, green and blue. And if they did, they should see the same color. Uh So it's a way of describing color. You'll also see if you come over here to the channels panel that this is really what your image is made out of the top thing up here doesn't actually contain anything. It just shows you what it looks like when these three are put together. So here, if I choose red, that's how much red light is used. So there's no red light here, if there's a whole bunch there and so on here is how much green light is used. And here is how much blue light is used and these are shown as black and white instead of color just because they're easier to compare when you're not distracted by the fact that you see red green or blue light. Like we did a few minutes ago when I actually pulled this apart, what we were seeing then is the exact same content as what's in these three channels. You just saw them with color. The next concept you should know is that you're not stuck with just one kind of version of red, green and blue and just like I could buy a flashlight that outputs red light and I could also buy a light bulb from a different company that produces red light. I wouldn't expect these two to produce the exact same color of red. Well, the same is true for Photoshop documents. When you say you want a certain percentage of red to be used in an area, then we need to know what's known as what color space it's in and all that does is it defines the precise colors of red, green and blue that this image is made out of. So let's look at that concept. So here's red, green and blue behind the scenes. That's what everything's made out of. And just to remind you in a different way, let's see what it would look like if we just took, let's say red light and dimmed it down and dimmed it down until we had none and we did the same thing for green and blue. That's what you see here. It's just that vertical line shows you what happens when you progress to less and less red light and then we're progressing to less and less blue and less and less uh green. Uh But then you could create colors that are in between. What if I had as much green as I could possibly use? And I add just a little bit of red to it and then add a more aggressive amount of red. What would you get? Well, that's what this shows you. So that right here you'd have 100% green light and then this is what it would look like if you started adding red, adding red. And right up here now you have just as much red as you had green. You don't have to remember this. All you have to know is all these colors that are in between are just a mix of red, green and blue. But we don't do it like this where there are chunks where we only have about six choices to go between them. Instead we can go just smooth amounts between them. But all the colors that we end up creating are a combination of red, green and blue. So let's talk about the options we have for what precise colors of red, green and blue are being used to make up the image. So here are the three main choices that we have and you may have heard of these names before because they appear in a bunch of places in Photoshop and you'll read about them on the web. But what we're seeing here is on the left is Sr GB, middle, is Adobe and the right is pro photo and you can see that pro photo ends up using dramatically more vivid versions of red, green and blue than Adobe R GB. And Sr GB uses the mellowest uh versions of red, green and blue. So if I'm in Sr GB, I cannot create a color that is this vivid because this is the most vivid red we have period. So let's talk about these choices. Why do we have them? And which one should you choose if you're ever asked to choose between them? So first Sr GB, its official name is Sr GB IEC 61966- 0.1. Well, that was created back in the nineties by Hewlett Packard in Microsoft. And then this organization, the IEC decided to turn it into like an official standard and they called it that gobble *** number you see on the right and it's only because of that stupid number they added on the right that in Photoshop, we see all the letters afterwards and the IEC means international, whatever that is commission uh and whatever they happen to name it, but we just call it Sr GB. So what's up with Sr GB. Well, it's based on the colors of red, green and blue, that what are known as the phosphorus that make up the colors on a con consumer grade tube television, like from back in the nineties, back when you used to play arcade games. So it would be a big glass tube that you're working on. And so those colors of red, green and blue are the primary colors that those old tube TV S used for red, green and blue. And so that's what they're based on. But then there was another standard, this is one you probably have not heard of and it was called ESR GB, the E standard for extended, I believe. And it was created a little later and this is because people that ended up printing on high end color printers, they didn't like using SR GB to define all the colors the made up picture because otherwise they were limited to all the colors that you can see on an old school tube television and their printers were capable of printing colors that are much more vivid than that. So they wanted to do something that would not limit them to the technology of an old C RT screen. So they came up with this thing called ESR GB and it totally failed and I haven't seen an er SR GB file ever. Uh And I've been using Photoshop for over 30 years uh and they tried to make it a standard but it just did not catch on. And instead, a while later, Adobe R GB and Pro Photo R GB uh superseded it where there's no longer a need for that other version uh of Sr GB that tried to create a wider range of colors. But somebody somewhere still has some of these files that are called ESR GB. And just because of that, when you're in Photoshop and you go to choose between these, when you see Sr GB, there's gonna be that gobble *** of letters and numbers after it. And if it just wasn't for that other company, why didn't they just call it the P I MA par GB? They, they could have done that and then there wouldn't have been confusion, but there are two versions at least of Sr GB, but there's only one that Joel and end up using in Photoshop. And so if anyone ever mentions Sr GB, they mean the one with all the gobby *** on the end of it. And I will never mention the gobble *** after this. I'll just call it Sr GB from now on, but just know it's based on the range of colors that you could uh get on an old school tube TV. So Sr GB is the standard for the web. When you save things for the web, using any feature that's designed specifically for the web, there'll usually be a little check box that'll say convert to Sr GB and it's not a bad thing to turn that thing on because a lot of software and a lot of websites, uh, they'll ignore any other setting and they'll assume your picture is set to this and if it's not, it just won't look. Right. So that's why whenever you save for the internet, you usually find that little check box that says convert to SR GB. And most of the time I turned on. But then another popular choice is Adobe R GB and Adobe came up with Adobe R GB so that you could have a document that could include most of the colors that you could print on a high end color printer. Like if you own a printer that sits on your desk, an centric Canon or HP or something. And that therefore, we don't have to limit the range of colors in our images to what you could see back in the nineties on a tube television. Uh And therefore, Adobe R GB is most likely a better choice, especially if you end up having a printer that you own, that's color and you want to get nice vivid colors out of it. Then there's one other choice. It's called pro photo R GB. And it's designed in general to allow you to define 100% of the likely colors that you're gonna en encounter in the real world. That means any color you've seen with your eyes walking around. You can probably describe if you use Pro Photo R GB, but you might think that's great. It's like, wow, I can describe everything I've ever seen. That sounds like the perfect world. Uh It's not, uh there's a lot of issues with using Pro Photo R GB. One of them is that 13% of all the colors that you could describe. Meaning the combination of red, green and blue numbers are not even colors because they're not things you could view with your eyes. They're not things any printer could show or any monitor could display. They are what you might call theoretical colors. But these are the three main choices. And what we're choosing here is literally what our picture is made out of behind the scenes. So if I tell it to make the more most vivid red, how vivid could that be? Well, it depends on the choice that I use here. And Sr GB would limit me the most be perfectly fine if I print my images in the newspaper though, because the newspaper cannot reproduce really vivid colors. If I have a printer sitting on my desk, though Adobe R GB would allow me to get a little closer to the full range that that printer would be capable of. And then pro photo would be if I want to make sure that absolutely any color I could ever think about could be described, then I could think about using it. So when you use red green and blue, you can use a varied amount of it from 0 to 100%. So if, let's say I ask for 100% red and I'm using this, well, then if I'm gonna be thinking about Adobe R GB, I wouldn't need to use 100% because to find this color, I'm probably gonna find it. What, somewhere down here maybe. And so when I get to Adobe R GB, if I decided to switch to it, the amount of red where previously I'd asked for 100 might be right here and I could bring up the saturation on that image and it would be capable of getting more and more saturated until I hit the limit of Adobe R GB. And the only way I'd be able to make it more vivid would be to switch to this guy and this guy that amount of red, I don't even know where it would be in here. Maybe it's down in here somewhere. Uh But I would have a lot more leeway to ask for more red because I wouldn't be maxed out 100%. I would be somewhere way down and I could push it further. The same is true for green. The same is true for blue. But you're gonna have this choice in many areas of Photoshop and you will be forced to pick between it or if you just ignore it, it might be where you have a less than ideal looking image, but I should not leave you with this graphic of what pro photo Adobe and Sr GB look like because the video you're watching is incapable of showing you how vivid these should be. It's also largely incapable of showing you how vivid these should be. I know it can show you these because if you have a screen that can't show you the full range of Sr GB, then you have a screen that is lower tech than a 19 nineties tube television. And these days, all screens in general should be able to do that. But in order to show you these side by side like I have here, I changed them. Let me show you what I did. Now, here's a weird thing which is not the easiest thing to describe, but here are the same set of three colors, the pro photo ones, the Adobe ones and the Sr GB ones. But you should know that these aren't the actual colors I was referring to. And that's simply because the computer screen I'm working on can't show all those colors, it just can't get vivid enough to show it to you. And the format you use for recording and displaying video can't either. In fact, the format you use for video can only display the brightness range that is close to SR GB, meaning the most limited brightness range or color range that we would end up using in Photoshop. So what these are showing. It's not the actual colors. There is no display that I know of on earth that could display the three primary colors that are used for uh pro photo. They're just beyond any technology we have in a display. And therefore what I did here is I showed you what they look like relative to each other. But the top one here is actually SR GB, meaning SR GB is made out of very nice vivid colors. It's just that the one called Adobe R GB uses even more vivid ones and the one called pro photo is way more vivid than that. And it's in relation to how big of a difference you see between here. But don't think Sr GB makes your image out of things that are this melody, it doesn't. So the first place you might see this choice is if you go up to the file menu and you choose new, well, when you're creating a brand new document, you have to tell it things like the width and height, let's say I wanna eight by 10. And then this number means how big are the little squares that make up your image? If you print them? I put in a relatively normal number for printing. Uh And then down here, you just see normal settings, but you see this thing called advanced options. If you pop it open right there, that's your what's called your color profile. But it means what color of red, green and blue should this document be made out of? And when I click here, there might be a bunch of choices in here. But in general, there are three that are commonly used and the three that are commonly used are Sr GB, um Adobe R GB and Pro photo. And the way I think about them is if you're brand new to Photoshop and you're not used to thinking about technical details at all. And you want your life to be simple and easy. And that's more important than being able to get the most colors out of your printer. Then I would go for Sr GB. That will keep life simple because if you ever save your image and give it to somebody else, uh it will generally always look fine even if you messed up with some other settings related to color that will cover in a few minutes. Uh and your pictures will look fine. I mean, pretty much uh over 90% of the pictures you see on the internet are Sr GB. So if you see vivid colors on the internet, they're fine, then if you own your own printer and it's sitting on your desk, it's a color printer, it's high quality, then you might instead want to go up here because SR GB doesn't let you create all the colors you could possibly print. And so that might be a better choice if you print on your own uh or if you send out your image to be printed somewhere else and they do really high quality work, they might be able to handle that and you could make your colors a little more vivid. Then the choice called pro photo I would totally avoid until you become completely and totally comfortable with all the concepts that I cover in this video and anything else related to color management. This is for absolute professionals that completely know what they're doing and every level because it is very easy to screw things up. If you're in here, you can make things way too colorful to be printed and other things. I'm not telling you not to use this. I'm telling you only to use it if you really know why and you know the ramifications. So for me, I have my own printer setting here. So Adobe R GB is nice for me, but just because I use it doesn't mean you should if you want life to be simple and you don't have your own printer and all that SR GB works just fine. Anyway, that's the first place you might see it is when you create a new document, you hit, create another place you'd see it is if I come in here a bridge and I double click on a raw file. When you open a raw file, there is something down here at the bottom, a little line of text and I'm gonna click on it and in here are the equivalent to the settings we saw a few minutes ago when we created a brand new document. Uh and this is where you find those. It needs to know what color space do you want to be in when you get to Photoshop? And it offers again a bunch of choices. But the three main ones are Sr GB, Adobe R GB and pro photo. And my advice would be exactly the same when it comes to what to use here. But what we should do here is at least go in if you happen to have a raw file and see what it sets you and set it to what you think is going to be good for you and then click. OK? And that setting is usually sticky. Meaning the next raw file you open will use the same color space. But when I click open right now, now this image is in Adobe R GB and that means the colors of red, green and blue uh are going to allow me to approximate the range of colors that could be printed. And so it wouldn't be bad to use if I own my own printer. Now, if you ever want to find out what color space is a document in, in the lower left down here is some text and yours probably have some numbers there. But if you click on the little uh arrow to the right of it, you can choose what is displayed there. I have mindset to document profile and that tells me what color space is this image in. Uh And so I can just glance down there and know. Oh yeah, this one's in Adobe R GB. Then let's say I was gonna save the file. I come up here and choose save as I'll save it on my desktop right down here when you save an image is a check box and it says embed color profile and you see right there, same name do BR GB or if you work with SR GB, it would have said it there instead. What this means is when I save my picture include that information with it. So that when this gets opened again, it knows what color of red, green and blue the image should be made from. And I turn that on absolutely all the time. And I've begged Adobe to hide this, hide it under some advanced tab or you have to even type in a password if they would make it. So it was impossible to turn that off. They would eliminate at least 50% probably closer to 70% of the color problems people have. And yeah, so turn that on every single time you ever save a picture and if you ever turn it off or it, it's just, it might get turned off when you didn't mean it to uh know that when you reopen that picture, it will likely not look the same as it did when you uh saved it. Uh Let me see if I can make that happen. Uh What I'm gonna do is actually reopen this picture. I mean, not save it, go back to bridge and I'm gonna open it as the one I'm telling you guys not to use unless you're mega educated pro photo. The picture is not gonna look any different. I'm gonna hit open. Uh I'd need to adjust the image to make it more vivid. And then I was just, I'd just be able to get it to be more vivid. But I'm gonna take this image and choose save as it says Pro photo. And I'm gonna say I don't care about that. That sounds technical. I don't want to deal with it and uh I'm gonna just put in the file name so I know why I'm gonna say un tagged that's known as an un tagged image. It's not being tagged with a color profile. I'm gonna hit save then let's open that version that I just saved. OK? So I'm gonna close this one and I'm gonna grab it. It's just sitting on my desktop and bring it in here to Photoshop but look at that. It looks really dull. Well, that's because the image was made out of the equivalent to these colors here. And whenever an image does not have that information included with the picture, it doesn't tell it what colors it's made out of it defaults to what's down here. So wherever we were supposed to have uh 50% of this amount, this color of red, we're instead getting 50% of this color of red. And so of course, it makes the image look bad mellow. And so whenever you save a picture, be sure to turn on that check box, but then let's see what happens if I come down here and it says un tagged. Well, if you ever see a picture and you assume the colors they don't look right. Somebody gave it to you and you're like, why would you have the colors looking like this? They're so mellow. Well, then turn on this little thing down here to document profile and see if it says UN tagged. And here's what you do if it does go to the edit menu and there's a choice called assign profile. And that means tell me what color of red, green and blue this should have been made out of. And right here, you just click on this and switch between the three settings we've been talking about try Sr GB and I'd say now that doesn't nobody save it like that. Try Adobe still looks kind of mellow and then try pro photo. And if one of those three makes the image look obviously better than choose that and click OK. Now the image, if you look down there in the lower left, it is tagged with a color profile and now it does know what color of red, green and blue, this image should have been made out of. And if you ever get a bunch of images from someone and they are un tagged. Uh If they use Photoshop, please tell them when they're saving your images, be sure to turn on that checkbox. Otherwise each image you're gonna have to do that and you'll be guessing because they were not nice enough to turn on that check box for you. Now, when I said SR GB would make your life easy. Well, it always defaults to SR GB uh when it's un tagged. And so if your images started with that to begin with, even if you turn, turn on that check box, when you saved it, they'd still look normal when you open them again because it would make that as the assumption. Then in one of the lessons in this class, I demonstrated how to make one color match another. And therefore, if I had an iceberg like this one in a different picture, I could make it look the same color as this one. So if two images were going to be displayed on a wall framed and hung, uh the icebergs could look the same in color between the two and it could be done with anything. And the way I did that is I went to the info panel which you can find right here and we ended up using these R GB numbers. Well, you should know that those R GB numbers will not work in just any old document. Instead if you're in pro photo R GB, those are representing very vivid colors. And if you have another document that is instead an SR GB, then it's made out of uh a uh version of red, green and blue that are much metal. And so you don't want to use the same numbers. So if you're ever doing something where you happen to use these numbers and you're going between two different documents, you want to make sure both documents are in the same color space. So how do you do that? What if I need to use numbers that were found in this image? And I want to use them over here? Well, there's two different ways you could do it one simple way would just be to select the area that you need and copy it and then just go to the other document and paste it in and in the process of doing. So this will come up which I always choose, don't show again and look what it says, paste profile, mismatch and blah, blah, blah. Why? What is it saying? It's saying you're coming from Sr GB and where you're going to is not SR GB and it just wants to make sure you're aware of that. Now this to me is completely unimportant and I choose do not show again because it will always convert the colors in a way that makes them look right. And that's all I care about when I'm copying and pasting between documents. So I choose, don't show again. And therefore I just click. OK. Now what I have is this is the exact area from that other image that I copied and the colors will look visibly identical. So just copy and paste between the two documents is one way, then you could sample the colors right out of that area. But let's say I didn't want to copy and paste between the two documents. I want to keep them separate. Well, then we need the two to match. And this one's in pro photo, let's go to the other one. Here's what I'd do, I'd go to the edit menu and I would choose convert to profile and in here, it might look complicated, but you can ignore most things. All it's telling you is this is what you're currently in right here. And then it's asking you, what do you want to end up with? And you just choose whatever the other document is in and you can ignore all this stuff. Just click. OK. Now, if I look in the lower left, this one says pro photo and so did the other one. And so now if I use the R GB numbers from here, I can use them in that other document and they will represent the exact same color or to understand it better. Here's what I'll show you when it comes to R GB numbers. Imagine you put your mouse on top of an image and these numbers appeared, they're usually not percentages, they go between zero and 255 but you could convert them to percentages. I just thought it'd be easier for you to think about with them here. And if you choose a sign profile, what that means is leave those numbers alone, which is the exact formula for how much red green and blue is used to make an area and just tell it to use a different version of red, green and blue. And if you do, then those numbers you're gonna be using the exact same amount of red green and blue when you're done. And since you're gonna use probably a more vivid or a less vivid version of it, the color is gonna look different. And so the only time we use the choice called assigned profile is when the profile is missing. And so if you don't have a profile, you assign whatever you think it it is. And you usually guess by seeing which one makes the image look the best, but then convert to profile is different. Convert to profile is like converting from inches to centimeters, you get the exact same end result, even though the numbers that you're working with to describe it have changed. And so what you could say is maybe I'm in Sr GB, which uses really mellow colors of red, green and blue. And I'm saying, let's use 90% and then I convert over to Adobe R GB, which uses a more vivid version of red. Well, then to get the same look, we need to dial it down a little bit, not use quite so much. And we need to do the same thing for green and the same for blue in order to visibly end up with the exact same color. And just think of it like converting from the metric system over to imperial like inches to centimeters. You're not trying to um change what you have, but the numbers are gonna end up different when you're done. Whereas a sign profile would be as if somebody told you to make something and they wrote down numbers, but they did not put a measurement system with it. They didn't put inches, they didn't put centimeters, they didn't put millimeters and you're guessing. And when you're guessing you're not changing the numbers, the measurements that they gave you, you're just guessing that what the heck they meant. And so I don't ever want to choose a signed profile. I only use that when somebody else was not nice enough to turn on one little check box when saving their image. And so I have to guess and then I choose, convert a profile anytime an image is in one color space and I need it to be in another like when I want to use the R GB numbers between the two documents. But it's rare other than what I need to use the same numbers between documents. So you might never need to use those choices, but you're gonna find them here in Photoshop under the edit menu, right? There's a signed profile, do that when they're un tagged. Uh right. There is convert to profile, do that when you need this image to be in the same mode as something else or just copy and paste this paste it over there and it will do the convert process for you. All right. Enough about color profiles. I hate talking about them. I just want it to work and I know that's probably what you want to. But if you don't turn on that check box, when you save or you open an image from somebody else and they didn't have that Checkbox turned on, then you gotta know what to do. So a sign if it's missing convert, if you happen to need it to be something different, but you want the image to uh look consistent, you know, not change. Uh Now let's talk about printing. Uh what do we need to do to print our images? And just so you know, I do not usually print my images from Photoshop. I print my images from Lightroom Classic, which is also where I organize my images. I find the setup in there is dramatically more elegantly put together and you can use templates where once you set up the templates, printing is so easy, you just click on your picture, you choose print and you make sure it's positioned on the page the way you want and you hit the print button. That's it. Uh Because you set up the templates ahead of time. Photoshop. On the other hand, it, it doesn't let you have that stuff and it, I don't know why it feels just so crude that I would prefer not to print from Photoshop. If you don't use light R at all, know that the two main printer manufacturers, uh both Epson and Canon, they have their own plug in. You can add to Photoshop and if you do then what they offer for their software is much more elegant and simple and it will let you use templates. It's a lot more like lightroom has and therefore I would prefer it, but I don't want to prefer one printer manufacturer or you know, do things you can't do in Photoshop because we're not given a seminar on a particular brand of printer. So let's look at what's built in which can work fine. There's just a lot more details to deal with than if you use something else. And I should mention that Epson software is called Epson Print Layout and Canon software is called Canon Print Studio Pro. So if you Googled that they have it available from Mac and windows. And if you installed it and you wanted to print, instead of coming up to the file menu and choosing print, you would instead come up here to automate and this is where it would be. This is also where the Canon one would show up. And that would send your image over to their software to use. But instead, we're gonna be heading over here to print when we print our images. Now before we're able to accurately print an image or just preview what it's going to look like when printed, but do it on screen, we're gonna need something known as a printer profile and the printer profile is unique to the brand and model of printer that you're gonna be printing to the inks that will be used when printing and the paper. And so what they end up doing is they take a device, let me show you, they take a specialized file and they print it on that printer on that paper. And then this would be the print and then they take a device that can very accurately measure those colors and they knew exactly what they asked for for these colors and now they're measuring what did they become when they were printed? And in the process of going through that, you end up with a printer profile. Well, the person that's gonna do this because these will already be existing is whoever makes the paper you print on. And so if you use an Epson printer with Epsom paper, go to the Epson website, use a cannon printer with a cannon paper. Go to the Cannon website. But if you use either one of those printers with the Red River paper or with some other brand of paper, you need to go to the paper manufacturer's website because the printer manufacturers only gonna test their own paper. They're not gonna buy everybody else's paper, print it out and use this thing to measure it. But the paper manufacturer will. So when you go to their website, what you want to search for is there, you'll be usually be a search field and type in either printer profile, color profile or color management because color management is the general process for managing this stuff. And those are some of the things you could search for. And if you don't find it by searching, just scroll down and sometimes it's in the footer of their site. And for some reason, it doesn't show up in search, but one of the links will be that and other than that, go to the area called support and see if there's an area that says downloads and in there somewhere, it's just, they're not consistent with where they put them. You will find uh printer profiles for that particular paper. And if you print on three kinds of paper, even if they're from the same brand, then you're gonna need three different profiles. Uh And it will be specific to your printer. So they'll have a list uh for each kind of paper. Uh They'll have different models of Epson, different model Canons, HPS, whatever. Uh they should have them there. And if you can't find them on the manufacturer's website, you can Google type in the name of the paper and type in your printer and then say printer profile, someone will have likely had this device and made one if it's some odd paper where the manufacturer hasn't done it for you. But we need this thing because it describes how do colors shift when they're printed on that printer and with that paper and only if we know that can we send the right information to the printer to compensate for its oddities. And so let's figure out how that's done. So first, if I want to preview what this image is gonna look like before I even print it, maybe I don't own the printer and I'm gonna send this off to be printed somewhere else. If that's the case, I'm not going for a paper manufacturer's website. I'm gonna go for the company that's going to print this and ask them for a printer profile. Uh And here's what I would do. I'll go up to the view menu and there I find a choice called proof colors, proof colors. If I were to choose, it would turn on a feature known as soft proofing. Soft proofing means use software to simulate what one device will look like on another. And I'm not gonna turn that on yet because first you got to come up here to proof set up. Now, the choices that appear in this menu mainly have to do with printing on a printing press. And so I wouldn't usually need to choose those because I want to print like on a printer that's on my desk. But I'm gonna come up here then and choose custom and this comes up and let's take a look. Uh, first right here, it says device to simulate and this is where you're gonna choose a profile. Well, first off, if you download a profile, it's not gonna automatically show up in here. Although it might, if you use your printer, manufacturers, paper when you install the drivers for that printer that actually allow you to connect to the printer, it might install these for you. And so if you see them here, great. If you don't, when you download them from a website on windows, you can just right click on it. And if you do there's a choice called install profile and it'll do all the work for you on a Mac. You got to do a little bit on your own. Let me just show you where they go. If you go to the finder on a Mac, go to the go menu up here and you want to go to the library now on some Macs depending on how your Mac is set up. Library might not show up in this menu. If that's the case, hold down the option key when you click and that'll cause ones that are usually hidden in here to show up. And when you get in the library, you should find a folder that's called color sync. Open it up and in there is a folder called profiles and that's where you should put any printer profiles that you downloaded from a paper manufacturer's website or from a company that's gonna print your image for. You just put them in there, then you want to quit Photoshop and start it back up again because it only looks in here. I think when Photoshop launches to see if there's anything new. Now, you might notice that mine doesn't have my Epson profiles in here, even though I saw them in Photoshop. And that's just because you have more than one library folder on your computer. And if you look at mine, it says users and then my name and then this and that's because if I put something in here, it will only show up if I'm logged in as me. And instead I could have gone back down here and I'll find another library folder, whatever goes in here would be available to every single user that uses my computer. Like if they log in with a different user name and password. And so if I go in here, I'll find color sync and profiles and that's where Epson put theirs, but they put them in the same spot. But let's close that up and imagine you've already put yours in. So let's go to the view menu. Let's come down to proof, set up once again and choose custom. OK. Right here, device to simulate. And this will be usually the name of a printer, the printer I have on my desk over here is a P 600. And then this will be the kind of paper. So if you use gloss canvas or if you use uh metallic photo glossy or whatever it is you happen to use. Uh maybe I come in here and I use this exhibition fiber, which is nice uh paper and I choose that. Well, now it knows what um device I want to simulate. Then I come down here. Rendering intent is something where you can switch back and forth between the bottom two choices because this is something it'll ask you when you're printing and it wants to know if there's any colors in this picture that the printer is incapable of um printing just because they're too vivid, what should it do with them? And the bottom one would say let's only mess with colors that aren't printable and we'll just shift those until they're printable. And the one above it would say let's shift everything so that the ones that are not printable will shift into the printable range, but everything else will shift with it. So relative to each other, they look the same. Uh So it's hard to say it depends on the image. But you could switch between these two and see if you see any difference in the picture. I can see a difference on this one. When I choose relative, the colors look a little bit mellower. When I choose absolute, they look more vivid. And I'm thinking I just got to decide, do I like that more vivid version? It's personal choice. I can't tell you which one's better because you have a different opinion than I do. But when you print, um you're gonna have this choice. And so here you might as well see what, how it's gonna affect your picture before it comes out of the printer. Uh Then down here there is this check box, a similar simulate paper color and another one of simulate black ink and those I would have turned off. So then this is all I need to do. All I did was come in here and choose the choice called custom. And then right there, I chose the kind of printer and paper I'm using. And then I clicked between these two to pick which one I'd like to use. And then these two I don't use unless I've already printed the picture. And now I want to hold it up right next to my screen to compare it to what I'm seeing. On screen because your eyes adjust to the brightness you see in various areas. And if I turn on simulate paper color, then the brightness of my monitor is gonna get darker, at least where the picture is because the sheet of paper is not gonna be as bright as the brightest that uh Photoshop could make. And so it's gonna simulate that paper and this is gonna look darker and duller and simulate black ink would do the same thing for the darkness of, of the ink. And I only have that turned on if I'm holding a print up right next to the screen because otherwise, if I look at a different area of a room, I can't remember what the brightness was somewhere else and mentally compare it. It's only when there's right side by side that I need that turned on then over on the right, there's a save button and we could make a preset for this so I could click there and it'll bring me to a special folder. It's called proofing. If you click here, you can see the, the path it takes to get there, but just don't move away from it and you could save it in here and give it a name like the name of your printer and the name of the paper. I'm not gonna save this one because I already have some saved. And then if you did, it would appear in this menu. So I can switch between them and also I'll click. Ok. Here it would appear when I went here to proof set up right down here at the bottom. So if you end up printing on the same kind of paper on the same printer a lot, just quite a few presets. And that way you don't need to look at this custom dialog box that appeared. Instead, this will dial in the settings for you. Then if you go up here to the view menu, you got that choice called proof colors. If the check box is next to it, you're pre previewing what the print will look like. And if you choose it again, so the check box turns off now you're back to not thinking about printing, you're thinking about just what the image looked like before you consider printing. So it has a keyboard shortcut right there called the command Y. So if I type it, I can see printed versus before printed before I can see the greens, especially at the top there changed quite a bit. So you could try to adjust your picture. You can go over here and use adjustment layers. Maybe I come over and use, I don't know, hue and saturation. And I tell it to work on the greens and I tell it make it just a little bit brighter in the greens and maybe see if you can make it more saturated. But I want to do that when that choice called proof colors is turned on. So that if I try to move this up to a ridiculous level of vivacity that uh it would show me what it would look like in the printer instead of just letting the image get much more vivid than it could be printed. We wanna see what it would look like when printed. But if you end up doing any adjustments just for printing, I usually would put them in a folder and I would say print adjustments. And I would also list the paper that they were printed for, you know, adjusted for because then I would turn it off. So if I want to use this image for a different purpose, I don't want to limit the range of colors for a printer. When I'm not printing it, I'm using it for social media or something else. And only if I wanted to print it would I turn those adjustments back on because they were tweaking it for printing. But I'm gonna throw that away. Now, if you want to see where within your image, the image had to shift, uh just go to the view menu. And when you have proof colors turned on, there's this choice called gamut warning and you just add a shift key to the keyboard shortcut that was up here. But let's see what it does that puts gray on top of your picture wherever the image needed to shift. And so those were the areas where the colors were beyond what your printer was capable of. And so it had to do something about it. And if I use that one choice called absolute color metric, it would have tried to just shift those. And if I used the other one, the one that was called relative color metric, it still would have needed to shift these, but it would shift the other colors along with. So the transition between everything remains relative to each other uh looking about the same. But just so, you know, a lot of people think that these areas covered in gray. If you turn this on are areas that you need to adjust and you need to get the gray off, you don't need to, all that does is that tells you where to be more critical. When you're evaluating the image, when you print, it will have already shifted those areas. And it's only if you didn't like the way they shifted when you turned on proof colors that you need to do anything at all about it. And so feel free to make adjustments in those areas or to the image as a whole. Uh But that's just letting you know where was it that it couldn't print the colors and therefore it had to make a change to the look of the image. All right, then if I'm not thinking about printing, I'd turn off proof colors. You're welcome to leave it on the whole time. If all you ever do is print your pictures, then you'd never see crazy colors that aren't printable. You would only see the range that are printable. But let's print. Let's head over here to our file menu. Let's choose print. And here we go. So first off up here is the printer. So if you have more than one printer, you can switch between them. Here, you can't add a printer from this menu. At least not on a Mac. Um So here I have two copies, but I'll, I'll use this one. Then down here is this choice called print settings. That's where you go to define the paper size and this is gonna bring you kind of out of Photoshop and in your computer's operating system. So this is not part of Photoshop, this is the operating system doing it. And because it's your operating system, if you click here, you can add a printer because you have to do it. So it adds it for all um programs. And the other thing I could do if I had that duplicate, like this one, I could come down to here and I can remove it. It's just gonna list my printers over here. Uh There's the duplicate and I can say remove printer. I'm gonna use my password and my finger. Yes, I'm sure I have two of them in there. I got rid of that uh extra one. But over in here, if you change the menu up here in Photoshop, it will change this menu too. So you don't have to mess with that if you've already chosen that in uh Photoshop, but right down here is what we need. And that's the paper size. If you click here, you got a bunch of different sizes. And for instance, when I choose us letter to get an 8.5 by 11 on mine, just because my printer driver defines what's in this list. I'm gonna find a choice of just letter or letter borderless. And if I choose borderless, then if I come back up here, that's going to allow um Photoshop to print all the way to the edge of the sheet of paper. And if I don't choose that, then it might force me to have a, a border, a gap around it. But anyway, all we need to do there is choose the paper size, we're gonna choose save. Then here we can choose, is it gonna be a vertical sheet of paper or a horizontal since my image is horizontal? That's what I'm gonna end up choosing. And then before we get into the settings that are down here, let's just look at these check boxes. Uh Here the match print colors. That's the same as the thing we did before, which was called soft proofing. Remember we went up to the view menu and, and said proof colors. Uh that just means, you know, make the colors in here look like what you would see when you print. Uh you don't have to have that turned on because right now I'm just thinking about the layout. If you have that turned on, then the gamut warning would put that same gray stuff over the image. Uh just like it did when we had the uh the soft proofing turned on. And then here the show paper white would do the same thing as the simulate paper white that you saw when you're soft proofing. So these, I usually have turned off because by the time I get in here, I'm just thinking about the layout of how does it fill the sheet of paper, that kind of thing. Then here it says color handling and you have two choices. Uh Do you want to have Photoshop deal with the colors or do you want your printer driver to deal with them somewhere? You're gonna have to choose that uh printer profile and you could either do it here or do it in your uh in the print dialogue of the operating system. And I would have Photoshop do it. And therefore right here it says printer profile and right there is where you gotta choose the paper and the printer. So if I was gonna go for Expedition fiber, I would choose it there. Then down here uh normal or hard proofing. What the heck is hard proofing? Hard proofing is if you wanted to make a print that looks as if it came off of a different device. Like I'm gonna do a, um, an ad in the newspaper, a newspaper has really crude paper. The colors don't look as vivid and such. So maybe I have a printer on my desk and I want to print it so the colors look like it would in a newspaper. Well, as long as I chose the settings that would be appropriate for a profile for that uh paper, then I could do a hard proof, which means print on my printer, but make it look like a different kind of output. I'm doubting that's what you need to do. So you just have that set to normal. Then right here it says rendering intent. Remember we have these choices when uh we did soft proofing, they're the same choices. The top two, you don't usually uh use, it's the bottom two, although you're welcome to switch between them when you're doing soft proofing and you'd be able to see the difference and whichever one you liked when you're soft proofing, you should choose here. I turn on black point compensation that should make sure the darkest part of your image will use the darkest shade that's printable in that printer. And that's the main setup. Now, there are a bunch of other settings down here. Let's just come down here, description just shows you information. It doesn't uh it's no settings. Here's your position and size, you can center it or you can scale it, you can say fit media. Uh So it fits within everything there and it looks like even when I chose border list, it still has a little border in here and we'll see about that. We have an area down here called print selected area. Uh Not very often to use that, but let's say I was gonna print a massively huge uh print one the size of a wall or something. Uh And I didn't want to print the whole thing just to see what the colors look like or to see if I liked how sharp the image was. Well, if I turn that on, then over here, you're gonna see these little guys that I can pull in to say where within it would I like to select? Say this is the section I'm gonna print. Therefore, I can use a smaller bit of paper to test this, make sure the colors look good and the sharpness looks good before I go to print a really big print. And I could also turn that off and then you wouldn't see that below that. We have a bunch of things. Here's printing marks. These aren't usually used by most for folks, they are used by people that uh print on printing presses. Uh And they would need some of these choices. Although the corner crop marks can be useful if you scale your image down. So it doesn't fit the entire image on the the thing. Instead you say, hey, I only need to print this big, then you could tell it to put in corner crop marks, then you'd have something to line up with if you're going to put a ruler on there and cut it after printing, so those could be useful. But the rest of these are mainly used for people who do prepress that, prints on printing presses, uh functions, Same thing here if you want to print a negative, which is gonna print the opposite of what you're seeing here. Uh It, that's done for prepress. And so is the emotion down uh background that would just replace this area around here. Well, if you had anything that where the picture doesn't fill it, do you want to fill it with a color? Do you want to put a border around the edge and uh bleed would mean it, it would go beyond that, try to go beyond the sheet of paper. Um But we don't usually need that. And then this very bottom off part, postscript options disabled that would only be there. If you are working on a printer that's designed more for graphic arts than photography, you might have some options there. So in general, when you come in here, the main thing you're doing is you're choosing your printer up here, you're hitting print settings to choose the paper size in orientation. And then down here you're saying, hey, f Photoshop, manage the colors. What is the paper and printer I'm printing to? And then when I did soft proofing, what setting made it look the best and you usually have that on. And then the other thing you're doing is position and size and here you end up deciding you want to fill the sheet of paper or not. The only thing that's odd with mine is I still see this little kind of border around it with the little hashes. And that usually means that I can't print all the way to the edge and to get that to be fixed. Usually I come in here to print settings and it has to do with the, uh, paper that I choose. And here I thought, oh, it looks like I didn't choose it, it set a US letter. I thought I sent it to that, uh, to go borderless. Let's see. Yeah. There, it got rid of the majority of that little edge. Uh, I had thought I chose that earlier. Uh, and then I could be able to print all the way to the edge of the paper. Then down here we have done, done means I just wanted to set this up for when I'm going to print, but I don't want to print right now and then print means let's send it all the way to the printer. So I'm gonna choose done as if I'm gonna print it later on. And these are the settings I want to use when I do that. Then there's one other choice if you go to the file menu, we were just in print, but then there's this choice print one copy. What's that? Well, that means use the exact same settings as the last time uh I printed and I just need to print another version. Maybe I printed and I noticed it needed a teeny bit of retouching. So I retouched it. And now I don't want to think about the settings. I just want to use the last settings that were used. And so I could print one copy and it would spit it out. So I hope that gives you an idea about what's called uh R GB color spaces. That's what your image is literally made out of the color of red, green and blue. And you'll have to choose that when you make a new document, it's in there and when you open a raw file at the bottom, it's in there. If you open a JPEG or something else, whoever produced that image, it might have been a camera might have been somebody else. They made that choice. If you go into the menu system for your camera, it's one of the choices and I usually change mine the defaults Sr GB, I put mine on Adobe R GP. Uh And so that you should know about and Sr GB makes life easy if you just don't want to think about technical detail. It's not a bad place to start and your images won't look bad. Uh Adobe R GB, I would suggest if you have your own printer or you send out to get really high quality output, but you need to talk to the place that you send your output to and just say, hey, can you handle Adobe R GB? Because some companies want everything to be standardized and if so they bring, they dumb it down to the simplest way of doing things. And that would be SR GB. So you just need to confirm uh and then pro photo only if you get truly educated about this stuff, I don't want to suggest you head there casually and when you print before you print, you might want to see what it's gonna look like to see if you want to adjust the image at all. And so you go up to the view menu and there's a choice called proof colors to dial in your specific printer and paper. You go up there and there was a choice called custom where you dial it in and you could save a preset for it. Uh And then there you're deciding what is the best rendering intent that was relative or absolute. You're just switching between them, looking at your picture and whatever it is you choose, use the same settings when you print and it'll have the same effect that you saw on screen. And while proof colors turned on. You're more than welcome to adjust the image specific to that kind of printing. Uh And that's just fine. And then finally head to the file menu and choose print when you need that to actually be sent to your printer.