You want your photos to look as good as possible and to have beautiful, breathtaking color, right? That’s probably why you bought Elements. But now that you’ve got the program, you’re having a little trouble getting things to look the way you want. Does the following sound familiar?
What’s going on? The answer has to do with the fact that Elements is a color-managed program. That means Elements uses information about your monitor when deciding how to display images. Color management is the science of making sure that the color in your images is always exactly the same, no matter who opens your file or what kind of hardware they’re viewing it on or printing it with. If you think of all the different monitor and printer models out there, you get an idea of what a big job this is.
Graphics pros spend their whole lives grappling with color management, and you can find plenty of books about the finer points of it. At its most sophisticated, color management is complicated enough to make you curl up in the fetal position and swear never to create another picture. Luckily, Elements makes color management easy. Most of the time, you have only two things to deal with: your monitor calibration and your color space. The following pages cover both.
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There are a couple of other color-related settings for printing, too, but you can deal with those when you’re ready to print. Chapter 16 explains them.
Most programs pay no attention to your monitor’s color settings, but color-managed applications like Elements rely on the profile—the information your computer stores about your monitor’s settings—when it decides how to print or display a photo onscreen. If that profile isn’t accurate, the color in Elements won’t be either.
So, you may need to calibrate your monitor, which is a way of adjusting its settings. A properly calibrated monitor makes all the difference in the world in getting great-looking results. If your photos look bad only in Elements or if your printed pictures don’t look anything like they do onscreen, calibrating is a good way to start fixing the problem.
Calibrating a monitor sounds intimidating, but it’s actually not that difficult—some people think it’s even kind of fun. And it’s worth it, because afterward your monitor may look about a thousand times better than you thought it could. Calibrating may even make it easier to read text in Word, for instance, because the contrast is better. Your calibrating options, from best to only okay, are:
Use a colorimeter. This method may sound disturbingly scientific, but it’s actually the easiest. A colorimeter is just a device with special software that does the calibration for you. Using such a device is much more accurate than calibrating by eye. For a long time, only pros could afford colorimeters, but these days if you shop around, you can find the Pantone Huey or the Spyder2Express for about $70 or less. More professional calibrators like the i1 Display Pro or the ColorMunki Display aren’t that much more expensive. If you’re serious about controlling your colors in Elements, this is by far your best option.
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Your calibration software probably asks you to set the brightness and contrast before you begin, even though most LCD monitors don’t have adjustable dials for these settings. If you’re happy with your monitor’s current brightness and contrast, you can safely ignore this step. Unless you have a reason to use different settings, for an LCD monitor, you usually want to set the white point to 6500 (Kelvin) and your gamma to 2.2.
Software. Whether you have a Windows computer or a Mac, you likely have some kind of software that can help you improve what you see.
Windows: There’s a good chance that the drivers (software) for your graphics card include some kind of calibration tool. Go to Control Panel→Appearance and Personalization→Display→Calibrate Color to use the Windows calibrator (in Windows XP: Display→Properties→Settings→Advanced) to see what you have.
Mac: If you go to System Preferences→Displays→Color→Calibrate, you can use Apple’s Display Calibrator Assistant to calibrate your monitor—sort of (see Figure 7-5). You can also find lots of calibration programs online, but most of them aren’t much, if any, better than the Assistant.
Adobe Gamma. If you have an older Windows version of Elements (Elements 5 or earlier), you may have this program, which used to come with Elements. It’s pretty ancient, was never meant to work with anything but old CRT monitors (the big, fat ones like old-fashioned televisions), and doesn’t work in Windows 7 or Vista. If you happen to have Adobe Gamma, it’s better than nothing, but it’s probably less useful than any other program you might have for adjusting your display.
If your photos still look a little odd even after you’ve calibrated your monitor, you may need to turn on the Ignore EXIF setting in the Editor’s preferences; see Figure 7-6.
Figure 7-5. Using the Display Calibrator Assistant is pretty simple. You can do a basic calibration that sets your gamma and white point, or turn on the Expert Mode checkbox for a more elaborate color-balancing process. In Expert mode, you look at a series of apples (of course!) on a striped background and adjust things till the apples blend into the background. The problem is that it’s almost impossible to get accurate results from a visual calibration. The Calibrator Assistant is better than nothing, but a colorimeter is a much better option.
Figure 7-6. If all the images from your digital camera have a color cast (usually red or yellow), go to Edit→Preferences→Saving Files/Adobe Photoshop Elements Editor→Preferences→Saving Files, and turn on “Ignore Camera Data (EXIF) profiles.” Some cameras embed nonstandard color information in their files, so this setting tells Elements to pay no attention to it, which should make your photos display and print properly.
The other thing you may need to do to get good color from Elements is to check which color space the program is using. Color spaces are standards that Elements uses to define your colors. That may sound pretty abstruse, but they’re simply ways of defining what colors mean. For example, when someone says “green,” what do you envision: a lush emerald color, a deep forest green, a bright lime, or something else?
Choosing a color space helps make sure that everything that handles a digital file—Elements, your monitor, your printer, and so on—sees colors the same way. Over the years, the graphics industry has agreed on standards so that everyone has the same understanding of what you mean when you say “red” or “green”—as long as you specify which color space (set of standards) you’re using.
Elements gives you only two color spaces to pick from: sRGB (also called sRGB IEC61966-2.1 if you want to impress your geek friends) and Adobe RGB. When you choose one, you’re telling Elements which set of standards you want it to apply to your photos.
If you’re happy with the colors you see on your monitor in Elements and you like the prints you’re getting, you don’t need to make any changes. If, on the other hand, you aren’t satisfied with what Elements is showing you, you’ll probably want to modify your color space, which you can do in the Color Settings dialog box (Figure 7-7). Go to Edit→Color Settings or press Shift+Ctrl+K/Shift-⌘-K. Here are your choices:
Figure 7-7. If you select the “Allow Me to Choose” option here, you see the Missing Profile dialog box each time you open a previously untagged image.
No Color Management. Elements ignores any information that your file already contains, like color space data from your camera, and doesn’t attempt to add any color info to the file. (When you do a Save As, there’s a checkbox that offers you the option of embedding your monitor profile. Don’t turn on this checkbox, since your monitor profile is best left for the monitor’s own use, and putting the profile into your file can make trouble if you ever send it someplace else for printing.)
Always Optimize Colors for Computer Screens. This option selects the sRGB color space, which is what most web browsers use; this is a good choice when you’re preparing graphics for the Web. Many online printing services also prefer sRGB files. (If you’ve used an early version of Elements, this is the same as the old Limited Color Management option.)
Always Optimize for Printing. This option uses the Adobe RGB color space, which is wider than sRGB, meaning it allows more color gradations than sRGB. This is sometimes your best choice for printing—but not always. So despite the Color Settings dialog box’s note about how this option is “commonly used for printing,” don’t be afraid to try one of the other settings instead. Many home inkjet printers actually cope better with sRGB or no color management than with Adobe RGB. (For Elements veterans, this setting used to be called Full Color Management.)
Allow Me to Choose. This option assumes that you’re using the sRGB color space, but lets you assign either an Adobe RGB tag, an sRGB tag, or no tag at all (color tags are explained in a moment). After you select this option, each time you open a file that isn’t sRGB, you see the dialog box shown in Figure 7-7 which you can use to assign a different profile to a photo. Just save the image once without a profile (turn off the ICC [International Color Consortium] Profile checkbox in the Save As dialog box), and then reopen it and choose the profile you want from this dialog box. Or, the box on Converting Profiles in Elements explains an easier way to convert a color profile if you need to make a change.
So what’s your best option? Once again, if everything looks good, leave it alone. Otherwise, for general use, you’re probably best off starting with No Color Management, then trying the others if that doesn’t work.
If you choose one of the other three options, when you save your file, Elements attempts to embed the file with a color tag, info about the file’s color space—either Adobe RGB or sRGB. (This kind of tag isn’t related to the Organizer tags you read about in Chapter 2.) If you don’t want a color tag—also known as an ICC Profile—in your file, just turn off the checkbox before you save the file. Figure 7-8 shows where to find the profile information in the Save As dialog box, and how to turn the whole process off.
Figure 7-8. When you save a file, Elements offers to embed a color tag in it. You can safely turn off the ICC Profile checkbox and leave the file untagged. (Assigning a profile is helpful because then any program that sees the file knows what color standards you’re working with. But if you’re new to Elements, you’ll usually have an easier time if you don’t start embedding profiles in files without a good reason.)
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Elements automatically opens files tagged with a color space other than the one you’re working in without letting you know what it’s just done, so you won’t know that there’s a mismatch between the file’s ICC profile and the color space you’re using in Elements. (If, on the other hand, you try to open a file in a color mode that Elements can’t handle, like CMYK, then Elements offers to convert it to a mode you can use.) So, if you have an Adobe RGB file and you’re working in “Always Optimize Colors for Computer Screens,” Elements doesn’t warn you about the profile mismatch the way early versions of the program did—it just opens the file. If you consistently get strange color shifts when you open your Elements-edited files in other programs, check to be sure there isn’t a profile mismatch between your images and Elements.