Setting Color Management Policies in Photoshop Part 1

After you’ve established working color spaces, the next step is to establish the default color management policy for each color mode. In other words, you need to tell Photoshop how to interpret and manage the color profiles of files it opens.

Photoshop looks at the color profile of an opened or imported file, compares it to your working spaces, and then employs the default policies you have established. If the files it opens have been embedded with the same color profile as yours, there isn’t an issue. You’re good to go. But sometimes this isn’t the case:

-->You may open files that have no profile. These can be older files, files that were created with color management turned off, or files created in other applications that do not employ color management.

-->You may open a file that has a color profile that doesn’t match your working space. Say that you have a Web designer friend, and his settings are based on the Web Graphics Defaults. He gives you a file, and you open it on your computer. You do mostly print work, so your settings are the U.S. Prepress Defaults. He gives you a file, which you open in Photoshop on your computer. Photoshop then displays an alert that says the file has an embedded color profile that doesn’t match your current RGB working space — his working space is sRGB and yours is Adobe RGB (1998). The alert then goes on to describe the default policy that is invoked on the file.

Again, if you have selected a predefined setting, the policies have already been established for you, and those should work fine. I do recommend, however, that you change the policies of one of the predefined settings. If you choose Web Graphics Defaults, the Color Management Policies options are all set to Off. Unless you have a good reason not to, change these to Convert to Working RGB. Remember color management is a good thing.