Reassigning, Removing, or Converting Color Profiles in Photoshop

Before you read this section, let me gently note that the operations described are really for advanced users. Although these aren’t overly difficult, you should know why you’re doing a particular operation and have a good reason for doing it. That said, once in a great while, you may want to either assign a different color profile to an image without converting the color, convert an image’s color profile, or on a very rare occasion, eliminate the color profile of your image altogether. For example, say you’re a photographer and you need to take a folder of photos and hand them off to a Web design firm. In that case, you may want to change the Adobe RGB (1998) color profile of those images to sRGB.

To reassign or eliminate a color profile, choose Image➪Mode➪Assign Profile and select one of
the following three options:
-->Don’t Color Manage This Document: Strips the color profile and doesn’t employ color management.

-->Working RGB (or CMYK or Grayscale, depending on your color mode): your working space: Assigns your current working space to a file that either is untagged or has a different color profile than your working space.

-->Profile: Choose the color profile you want from the pop-up menu. Photoshop assigns that profile to the file but doesn’t convert the colors to that profile. Be aware that this option may drastically change the appearance of the colors because the color numbers are retained (the numeric value of the color) in the new color profile.

Make sure that you have the Preview check box selected so you can see the result of your action.
To convert to another color profile, choose Image➪Mode➪Convert to Profile. Choose your desired color profile for conversion from the Profile pop-up menu. Your file is now converted and tagged with this color profile. You can also specify the color management engine (specifies the color matching method), rendering intent (the method used for color translation), and whether to use black point compensation (when selected, the full dynamic range is mapped to the destination space), and dithering options (colors are mixed to simulate a missing color in the destination space). Again, unless you are a real color guru, I recommend taking Adobe’s word for it and leaving the default settings for whatever destination profile you choose. Even if you don’t, I recommend that you select the Use Black Point
Compensation and Use Dither check boxes (unless the size of your Web graphics is critical).

If you have layers, you can choose to flatten all the layers into a single one. I recommend this because it makes the preview more accurate. Keep the Preview check box selected to view your conversion.