I just wanted to thank the guys who came to my gallery last night to be a part of the workflow workshop. It was a great night and managed to stagger into bed around 1am this morning. It was a great bunch, probably the best group yet!! (notice I say that about all the courses) Thanks for putting up with my rants and hope you got something to think about when next out taking photos or sitting in front of photoshop.

As we got a little stuck on the whole colour management subject I thought I would add a few notes to help ease the pain.

The aim of colour management is to maintain the same colour on all devices even though each device has a different colour gamut and the same set of numbers refer to a different colour.

In color management, an ICC profile is a set of data that characterizes a monitor, scanner, camera, printer, or a color space, according to standards set by the International Color Consortium (ICC). Profiles describe the color attributes of a particular device. A colour managed workflow uses these profiles to control colour reproduction between all the devices in the workflow. That is, they tell each device this is the colour we are looking at and they all understand each other.

A color space simply describes the range of colors, or gamut, that a camera can see, a printer can print, or a monitor can display. Editing color spaces, on the other hand, such as Adobe RGB, Dcam 3 or sRGB, are device-independent. They also determine a color range you can work in. Their design allows you to edit images in a controlled, consistent manner. I use Dcam 3 as my working colour space as it has a larger colour gamut than Adobe RGB 1998. You set your rgb colour space in photoshop, go to edit> colour settings> working spaces> RGB. This is important. I also make sure when I convert my raw files in camera raw I assign the colour space Pro Photo, then when opened in photoshop and prompted, I convert that file to the Dcam 3 colour space. Pro photo has a massive colour gamut so going from that to DCam 3 is fine even though Dcam 3 has a smaller gamut.

Easy peasy hey!!!