Color management in Photoshop

[Mare333]

Hello,
Marianne here. It's nice to meet my fellow photographers and I am very glad that I found this forum. I hope today you can help me out with a question. I have just purchased a monitor and calibrated and profiled it with the enclosed software. So now I have an ICC profile for my monitor. My question, however is about color management IN PHOTOSHOP. I see this term color management IN PHOTOHSOP thrown around all the time on the web, but what does it actually refer to? They say that Photoshop is color managed software, but do we ACTUALLY need to do anything to color manage IN PHOTOSHOP or does the software just do its thing? For example when we are editing and saving the image IN PHOTOSHOP do we ACTUALLY need to do anything to color manage it? Also the ICC profile that I created for the monitor, where does that fit into the picture? Do I need to do anything IN PHOTOSHOP to use this ICC profile or as long as I know my monitor is using this ICC profile displaying the colors according to this ICC profile I don't have to do anything else IN PHOTOSHOP? What I am most interested in is making sure the way I see the image shown on the screen will be the same as the print looks or at least close to it. To my understanding that's what color management is for. As you can see I am pretty confused, I would really appreciate if you shed some light on this subject for me. Thank you very much for your help,

[george013]

Hello,
Marianne here. It's nice to meet my fellow photographers and I am very glad that I found this forum. I hope today you can help me out with a question. I have just purchased a monitor and calibrated and profiled it with the enclosed software. So now I have an ICC profile for my monitor. My question, however is about color management IN PHOTOSHOP. I see this term color management IN PHOTOHSOP thrown around all the time on the web, but what does it actually refer to? They say that Photoshop is color managed software, but do we ACTUALLY need to do anything to color manage IN PHOTOSHOP or does the software just do its thing? For example when we are editing and saving the image IN PHOTOSHOP do we ACTUALLY need to do anything to color manage it? Also the ICC profile that I created for the monitor, where does that fit into the picture? Do I need to do anything IN PHOTOSHOP to use this ICC profile or as long as I know my monitor is using this ICC profile displaying the colors according to this ICC profile I don't have to do anything else IN PHOTOSHOP? What I am most interested in is making sure the way I see the image shown on the screen will be the same as the print looks or at least close to it. To my understanding that's what color management is for. As you can see I am pretty confused, I would really appreciate if you shed some light on this subject for me. Thank you very much for your help,

Your profile when calibrating the monitor is just a tool to correct your monitor. It's hardware related, not software.
Think of colors in wavelength, you don't have to know exactly what wavelength they're, just they exist as wavelength, analogue values.
Digital images have no colors, they've digital values. A value of 255,0,0 will tell the monitor to produce a color red with 100% of it's capacity. It would be nice if we all experience that color the same way. Monitors are using a colorspace that defines within what wavelengths it will produce colors. Look for a horseshoe and pay attention to the wavelength.
I'm not an editor and don't have PS. But this article might bring you further http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/color-spaces-page1. Read them all and open the links at the end to see if there's something more for you.
I hope I gave you some hints for further thinking.

George

[Mare333]

Your profile when calibrating the monitor is just a tool to correct your monitor. It's hardware related, not software.
Think of colors in wavelength, you don't have to know exactly what wavelength they're, just they exist as wavelength, analogue values.
Digital images have no colors, they've digital values. A value of 255,0,0 will tell the monitor to produce a color red with 100% of it's capacity. It would be nice if we all experience that color the same way. Monitors are using a colorspace that defines within what wavelengths it will produce colors. Look for a horseshoe and pay attention to the wavelength.
I'm not an editor and don't have PS. But this article might bring you further http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/color-spaces-page1. Read them all and open the links at the end to see if there's something more for you.
I hope I gave you some hints for further thinking.

George

Thank you for replying. It was really helpful and I will definitely look into the article you linked to. Thanks again, Marianne