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721 Chapter 15 ✦ Fully Editable Text Figure 15-28: I managed to transform a strange, drab composition into this mighty attractive poster art using nothing but text. Figure 15-29: Creating the Jelly-Vision logo was as simple as distorting the text and applying a Pillow Emboss layer effect. 722 Part IV ✦ Layers, Objects, and Text Layer effects bonanza You’ll have a blast experimenting with layer effects and type. Layer effects are fast, flexible, easy to use, and they were designed largely with editable type in mind. Sure, they get overused. But as with any cool feature, you can stay ahead of the curve by applying your effects creatively. Figure 15-30 shows three very simple but unusual implementations of layer effects. All three effects rely on character masks, but I created these selection outlines using standard type layers. I clicked with the type tool, entered the words Shake, Murder, and Imprint, and then formatted them. Then I Ctrl-clicked on the layer to draw out the selection outlines as I needed them. Why use a standard type layer to create selection outlines instead of the type mask option? Simple — because type on a layer is forever editable; a type mask is not. Editing type on a layer doesn’t affect an existing character mask, but I can Ctrl-click to generate new masks any time I like. The upshot is that a type layer serves double duty — to create both editable text and type masks. This one tool does everything you need, which is why I for one never change type tools; I always work with lay- ered type. Figure 15-30: Three examples of childishly simple layer effects applied creatively to character masks Tip 723 Chapter 15 ✦ Fully Editable Text That’s really the key to creating cool effects. The rest is just “scribbling and bib- bling” as a dramatized Mozart once said. But because the scribbles and bibbles may prove of minor interest to you, here’s how I made each effect: ✦ Shake: First, the boring stuff. I extracted the layer mask for the word Shake by Ctrl-clicking on my type layer and Shift+Alt-dragging around the word Shake with the rectangular marquee tool to deselect Murder and Imprint. Then I switched to the background layer and pressed Ctrl+J to send Shake to an inde- pendent layer. Finally I pressed the / key to lock the transparent pixels so I could edit the type and only the type. Now for the fun stuff. I created a pattern from the embossed texture back in Figure 15-4 using Edit➪ Define Pattern. Then I used Edit➪ Fill to fill Shake with the pattern. After double-clicking the new layer name to open the Layer Style dialog box, I applied a black drop shadow, setting the blend mode to Multiply, the opacity to 100 percent, and the angle to 45 degrees. Next I applied a white Inner Shadow, setting the blend mode to Screen, opacity to 85 percent, and angle to –135 degrees. The upshot is that the drop shadow darkens the back- ground and the inner shadow lightens the characters. ✦ Murder: I filled the background layer behind the word Murder with black. Then I did all the boring stuff that I mentioned two paragraphs ago — Ctrl- clicked the type layer, intersected Murder with the marquee tool, pressed Ctrl+J to send Murder to its own layer, and pressed / to lock the transparent pixels. I set the foreground color to white and brushed across the Murder layer with the paintbrush set to 40 percent opacity. Because the transparency of the layer was locked, I painted inside the letters only. Finally, I opened the Layer Style dialog box and applied a white drop shadow to the text layer, setting the blend mode to Screen and the Angle value to –126. The result is a directional glow. ✦ Imprint: Here I filled the area behind Imprint with the same pattern I defined for Shake, and then I mushed the pattern together using the filters Noise ➪ Median and Blur ➪ Gaussian Blur (both explained in Chapter 10). Then, as usual, I did the boring stuff — Ctrl-clicked on the original type layer, inter- sected Imprint with the marquee tool, and pressed Ctrl+J and the / key. With Imprint on its own layer, I double-clicked the layer name to open the Layer Style dialog box and applied the Bevel and Emboss effect using the Emboss effect style. The result was a bit disappointing. Muted and dark, it didn’t have the punch I wanted. To brighten it up, I duplicated the Imprint layer by dragging it onto the page icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. Then I pressed Shift+Alt+S to apply the Screen mode. The final result is the much sharper effect you see in Figure 15-30. ✦✦✦ Essential Color Management Plunging Headlong into Color Most artists react very warmly to the word color and a bit more coolly to the word management, especially those of us who have made the mistake of taking on managerial chores ourselves. Put the two words together, however, and you can clear a room. The term color management has been known to cause the sturdiest of characters to shriek and sweat like a herd of elephants locked in a sauna. It’s no exaggeration to say that color management is the least understood topic in all of computer imaging. From my experience talking to Photoshop users, most folks expect to calibrate their monitors and achieve reliable if not perfect color. But in point of fact, there’s no such thing. So-called device-dependent color — that is, synthetic color produced by a piece of hardware — is a moving target. The best Photoshop or any other piece of software can do is to convert from one target to the next. For what it’s worth, most consumer monitors (and video boards, for that matter) are beyond calibration, in the strict sense of the word. You can try your hand at using a hardware calibrator — one of those devices where you plop a little suc- tion cup onto your screen. But calibrators often have less to do with changing screen colors than identifying them. Even if your monitor permits prepress-quality calibration — as in the case of $3,000 devices sold by different vendors over the years, including Radius, Mitsubishi, and LaCie — it’s not enough to simply correct the colors on screen; you also have to tell Photoshop what you’ve done. 16 16 CHAPTER ✦✦✦✦ In This Chapter Setting up your monitor with the Gamma Wizard Selecting an RGB working space Embedding a color profile in a saved image Converting colors from one working space to another Using the Color Settings command Assigning profiles to untagged images Establishing color management policies Reacting to and disabling alert messages Changing the Intent setting Setting up a custom CMYK space Transferring CMYK settings from Photoshop 5 ✦✦✦✦ 728 Part V ✦ Color for Print and the Web Therefore, color management is first and foremost about identifying your monitor. You have to explain your screen’s foibles to Photoshop so that it can make every attempt to account for them. In the old days, Photoshop used the screen data to calculate CMYK conversions and that was it. Photoshop 5 went two steps farther, embedding a profile that identifies the source of the image and using this informa- tion to translate colors from one monitor to another. Photoshop 6 goes a couple of steps farther still, permitting you to work in multiple profile-specific color spaces at the same time — great for artists who alternatively create images for print and the Web —and specify exactly what to do with images that lack profiles. The new Color Settings command is both wonderful and bewildering. It can just as easily mess up colors as fix them. But if you read this chapter, you and your colors should be able to ride the currents safely from one digital destination to the next. And best of all, color management in Photoshop 6 is consistent with color management found in Illustrator 9 and future Adobe applications. Learn one and the others make a heck of a lot more sense. A Typical Color-Matching Scenario Photoshop 6 devotes three features to color management. The first is the Adobe Gamma control panel, which characterizes your monitor. Choose Settings from the Start menu, and then choose Control Panel. After the Control Panel window comes up, double-click the Adobe Gamma icon. The second feature is Edit➪ Color Settings. Choose this command or press Ctrl+Shift+K to display the Color Settings dialog box, which lets you edit device-dependent color spaces and decide what to do with pro- file mismatches. Finally, use File➪ Save As to decide whether to embed a profile into a saved image or include no profile at all. I could explain each of these features independently and leave it up to you to put them together. But peering into every tree is not always the best way to understand the forest. So rather than explaining so much as a single option, I begin our tour of color management by showing the various control panels, commands, and options in action. In this introductory scenario, I take an RGB image I’ve created on my Mac and open it up on my PC. The Mac is equipped with a PressView 21SR and the PC is hooked up to a generic Sony Trinitron screen, so I’ve got both extremes pretty well covered. Yet despite the change of platforms and the even more dramatic change in monitors, Photoshop maintains a high degree of consistency so the image looks the same on both sides of the divide. While the specifics of setting up your system obviously vary, this walk-through should give you an idea of how color management in Photoshop works. If you’re well-versed in Photoshop 5 and you already have a rough idea of how profile-based color management works, skip ahead to the section “Color Conversion Central.” There I explain the intricacies of the Color Settings dialog box, which is where the vast majority of the color management process occurs. Cross- Reference 6 Photoshop 6 6 Photoshop 6 729 Chapter 16 ✦ Essential Color Management Setting up the source monitor If you own a monitor with calibration capabilities, I recommend that you start off by calibrating it. In the case of the PressView, I launch a utility called ProSense that works with the hardware calibrator to both adjust screen colors and save screen profiles in a variety of formats. For purposes of Photoshop for the Mac, the most important format is ColorSync, which is Apple’s system-wide color management extension. I also save a Photoshop Monitor File version of the profile, as shown in Figure 16-1. Figure 16-1: When calibrating my PressView monitor, I direct the ProSense utility to save a ColorSync and Photoshop Monitor File version of the screen profile. The next step is to assign the profile to the monitor. I choose Apple ➪ Control Panels ➪ Monitors. Then I click the Color button to display the scrolling list of ColorSync Profile options shown on the right side of Figure 16-2. The PressView 21sr item turns out to be the profile I just created with the ProSense utility. I select it and move on. 730 Part V ✦ Color for Print and the Web Figure 16-2: On the Mac, choose the Monitors control panel and click the Color button (left) to load a monitor profile that will automatically work with Photoshop. The Gamma control panel “Swell,” I can hear you say, “But what do those of us with more down-to-earth monitors do?” For everyday people, Photoshop ships with the Adobe Gamma control panel. Choose Start ➪ Settings ➪ Control Panel to bring up the Control Panel window. Then double-click the Adobe Gamma icon. (If the control panel displays a warning that your video card doesn’t support system-wide color management, don’t sweat it. Most video cards don’t.) Select the Step By Step (Wizard) option and click the Next button to walk through the setup process one step at a time. If you see a control panel like the one on the right side of Figure 16-3, click the Wizard button to continue. When using the Adobe Gamma Wizard, all you have to do is answer questions and click the Next button to advance from one screen to another. For example, after adjusting the contrast and brightness settings, Gamma asks you to specify the nature of your screen’s red, green, and blue phosphors. If you own a Trinitron or Diamondtron monitor—which you’ll know because you paid more for it — select the Trinitron settings. Or select Custom and enter values according to your moni- tor’s documentation. If the documentation does not suggest settings, ignore this screen and click Next to move on. So you don’t know your phosphors—that’s life. You’ve got bigger fish to fry. The next screen, pictured in Figure 16-4, is the most important. It asks you to balance the red, green, and blue display functions of your monitor. But to do so, 731 Chapter 16 ✦ Essential Color Management you need to turn off the View Single Gamma Only check box; this presents you with separate controls over each of the three monitor channels. Then use the sliders to make the inner squares match the outer borders. You are in essence calibrating the monitor according to your unique perceptions of it, making this particular brand of characterization a highly personal one. Figure 16-3: Select the Step By Step option (left) or click the Wizard button to advance one step at a time through the monitor setup process. Figure 16-4: Turn off the View Single Gamma Only check box to modify each of the three color channels independently. 732 Part V ✦ Color for Print and the Web The next screen asks you to set the white point, which defines the general color cast of your screen from 5,000 degrees Kelvin for slightly red to 9,300 degrees for slightly blue. A medium value of 6,500 degrees is a happy “daylight” medium. To find the best setting for your monitor, click the Measure button. Then click the gray box that appears the most neutral — neither too warm nor too cool — until you get dumped back into the Gamma Wizard. Then click Next. When you click the Finish button, the Gamma utility asks you to name your new monitor profile and save it to disk. Name it whatever you want, but don’t change the location — it has to go into the Color folder inside the System or System 32 folder to be made available to Photoshop and other applications. Adobe Gamma generates a custom monitor profile and automatically alerts Photoshop to the change. You don’t even have to bring up the ColorSync control panel (though you may want to just to confirm). Your screen may not look any different than it did before you opened Gamma, but you can rest assured that Photoshop is now officially aware of its capabilities and limitations. Incidentally, the term gamma refers to the amount of correction required to convert the color signal generated inside the monitor (let’s call it x) to the color display that you see on screen (y). Imagine a simple graph with the input signal x along the bot- tom and the output y along the side. A gamma of 1.0 would result in a diagonal line from bottom-left to upper-right corner. A higher gamma value tugs at the center of that line and curves it upward. As you tug, more and more of the curve is taken up by darker values, resulting in a darker display. So a typical Mac screen with default gamma of 1.8 is lighter than a typical PC screen with a default gamma of 2.2. For a real-time display of gamma in action, check out the discussion of the Curves dialog box included in Chapter 17. Selecting the ideal working space Now that I’ve identified my monitor, I need to select an RGB working environment, which is a color space other than the one identified for the monitor. This is the strangest step, but it’s one of the most important as well. Fortunately, all it requires is a bit of imagination to understand fully. On my Mac, I switch to Photoshop and choose Edit ➪ Color Settings. Photoshop displays the dialog box shown in Figure 16-5. I’m immediately faced with a dizzying array of options —no gradual immersion into the world of color management here— but Photoshop does make a small attempt to simplify the process. The program offers several collections of predefined settings via the Settings pop-up menu. Among the settings are Color Management Off, which deactivates Photoshop’s color management entirely; ColorSync Workflow, which is useful in all-Macintosh environments; and Emulate Photoshop 4, which both turns color management off and mimics Version 4’s screen display. Note [...]... visit this dialog box, sRGB is fast becoming a cross-platform standard 735 7 36 Part V ✦ Color for Print and the Web Figure 16- 7: On the Windows side, I select Web Graphics Defaults to set my working environment to sRGB This forces Photoshop to make a conversion Defining color management policies The Color Settings command determines not only how Photoshop projects images on screen, but also how it reads... Custom CMYK dialog box 751 Photoshop 752 Part V ✦ Color for Print and the Web Loading CMYK settings from a previous version of Photoshop 6 Also missing from the Custom CMYK dialog box are the Load and Save buttons At first glance, you might think this means that Photoshop 6 does not support CMYK setup files created in previous versions of the program But in fact, Photoshop 6 is ready and able to use... setup files from the past — you just have to know how to get there Here’s how to save a setup file from Photoshop 5 and load it in Photoshop 6: STEPS: Load a CMYK Setup File Created in Photoshop 5 1 Launch Photoshop 5 This technique works in Photoshop 5.5 as well 2 Open the CMYK Setup dialog box Inside Photoshop 5 or 5.5, choose File ➪ Color Settings ➪ CMYK Setup 3 Save a CMYK setup file Inside the CMYK... means that Photoshop adds a little bit of code to the file stating where it was last edited.) For this, I choose File ➪ Save As, which displays the dialog box in Figure 16- 6 After naming the file and specifying a location on disk, I select the Embed Color Profile check box, which embeds the Adobe RGB color profile into the test image Then I click the Save button to save the file Figure 16- 6: I select... responsible for the error messages Photoshop delivers when opening images The trick is to keep the error messages to a minimum while keeping control to a maximum Here are my suggestions for each option with what I hope is enough explanation for you to make your own educated decisions: Chapter 16 ✦ Essential Color Management ✦ RGB: The first three pop-up menus establish default policies that Photoshop. .. clearly defined space to serve as the source for the conversion Photoshop 6 has successfully shaken that habit, but it still likes to ask you whether you want to manage the colors or not I say turn Ask When Opening off — enough alert messages already! — and let Photoshop take its cues from the RGB, CMYK, and Gray pop-up menus According to Figure 16- 13, this means Photoshop will tag unprofiled RGB images... reproduction on a commercial offset or web press, you first need to specify how you want Photoshop to convert the image from the RGB to CMYK color space This step also affects the conversion from CMYK to RGB, which in turn defines how CMYK images appear on screen Photoshop Chapter 16 ✦ Essential Color Management 6 In Photoshop 6, you specify the CMYK space by choosing Edit ➪ Color Settings Then select the... color profile Or define a custom CMYK conversion setup by choosing Custom CMYK from the CMYK pop-up menu When you choose Custom, Photoshop displays the Custom CMYK dialog box, shown in Figure 16- 16 Figure 16- 16: Use the options in the Custom CMYK dialog box to prepare an image for printing on a commercial offset or web press The following list explains each and every option in the Custom CMYK dialog box... bleed into the page and expand by about 25 to 30 percent For newsprint, it varies from 30 to 40 percent In any case, Photoshop automatically adjusts the brightness of CMYK colors to compensate, lightening the image for high values and darkening it for low values Tip For more control, select Curves from the Dot Gain pop-up menu As shown in Figure 16- 17, this brings up the Dot Gain Curves dialog box, which... an absolute pitch-black pigment — is 70 percent cyan, 63 percent magenta, 67 percent yellow, and 100 percent black And 70 + 63 + 67 + 100 =, you guessed it, 300 ✦ UCA Amount: The opposite of UCR, UCA stands for under color addition, which enables you to add cyan, magenta, and yellow inks to areas where the concentration of black ink is highest For example, a value of 20 percent raises the amount of . the vast majority of the color management process occurs. Cross- Reference 6 Photoshop 6 6 Photoshop 6 729 Chapter 16 ✦ Essential Color Management Setting up the source monitor If you own a monitor. cross-platform standard. Note Caution 7 36 Part V ✦ Color for Print and the Web Figure 16- 7: On the Windows side, I select Web Graphics Defaults to set my working environment to sRGB. This forces Photoshop. in a variety of formats. For purposes of Photoshop for the Mac, the most important format is ColorSync, which is Apple’s system-wide color management extension. I also save a Photoshop Monitor