Color Workflows for Adobe® Creative Suite® 3

About this paper

Written for professionals in the visual communications industry, this guide covers how to achieve accurate and consistent color and use Adobe Creative Suite 3 features effectively in your workflow. You can download the PDF version of this file, Color Workflows for Adobe® Creative Suite® 3. For details on how to use features discussed in this guide, see Adobe Creative Suite 3 Help.

Introduction

As a professional in the visual communications industry, you can rely on the Adobe® Creative Suite® 3 features in your color workflow to achieve more accurate and consistent color reproduction. Integrated color management technology in Adobe Creative Suite 3 will save you money and time when you send your color work to press.

Whether you are a new or experienced user of Adobe® Photoshop®, Adobe® Illustrator®, Adobe® InDesign®, or Adobe® Acrobat® Professional, you don’t need to become a color management expert to learn how to use the CS3 features effectively in your color workflow. This guide steps you through these CS3 features, covering four typical workflows, plus in-depth information on color profile alerts, hard-proofing documents, and color space sizes.

Achieving accurate and consistent color often is difficult because the two color models most used to specify color appearance—RGB and CMYK—are device-dependent. Given the same set of RGB or CMYK numbers, a monitor, scanner, and printer each produce a different color because the color depends on the characteristics of each device. For example, the color produced by a monitor depends on the color of its red, green, and blue filters or phosphors. The color produced by a printer depends on the type of paper, how it absorbs ink, and the colors of the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks.

The result: A scanned image doesn’t look like the original, and the final copy printed on the printing press doesn’t look like the image you saw on your monitor. Correcting these differences and trial-and-error printing can cost hours of lost productivity and revenue.

Figure 1. The challenge: Different devices—such as a monitor, scanner, and printer—each receive the same color values, but produce a different color.

Reproducing color better in Adobe Creative Suite 3

The color management technology in Adobe Creative Suite 3 lets you achieve more accurate and consistent color reproduction by performing two essential tasks:

• Identifying a specific color appearance for RGB or CMYK numbers in a document.
• Maintaining the color appearance by changing the color numbers needed by the target device to produce the specified color appearance.

Color management technology relies on profiles and a color management system (CMS). Profiles give the CMS the information needed to maintain the color appearance when a file is sent to a device, such as a scanner, printer, or monitor. For example, if the color represented by the numbers R235, G56, and B70 on a scanner is tomato red but looks closer to brick red on a monitor, the CMS translates the RGB numbers to those needed by the monitor to preserve the tomato red appearance. In this way, color management helps you reproduce consistent color—independent of the unique color characteristics of a particular device.

The easy-to-use color management features and tools in CS3 help you achieve and view colors consistently across applications and devices, ensuring more accurate color throughout your workflow—from edit to proof to final print.

See the Glossary for definitions of color management terms.

Color features in Adobe Creative Suite 3

These features help you manage color more easily.

• Color Settings files (CSFs) control the behavior of an application’s color management features. Adobe Creative Suite 3 comes with several preset CSFs—each based on a common workflow, such as Web/Internet or Prepress—that users can select from one central location in Adobe Bridge.
• Adobe Bridge serves as an easy-to-use, central location for selecting CSFs and then sharing those settings across all CS3 components, including Acrobat 8.0 Professional.
• CMYK color numbers are preserved in your workflow in Safe CMYK mode, using a Color Management Policy called "Preserve Numbers (Ignore Linked Profiles)."
• Spot colors preview and proof consistently between Adobe Illustrator CS3, Adobe InDesign CS3, Adobe Photoshop CS3, and Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional and Adobe Reader 8; conversions from spot colors to process colors are easy to control.
• Common color selection across CS3 components is possible with a common ASE swatch book format. Create a set of color swatches using InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, or Dreamweaver®, and then exchange those swatches across the Creative Suite.
• Black viewing and printing in Illustrator CS3 and InDesign CS3 features several options for more accurate results.
• Simplified, task-based print dialog boxes make it easier to control color management features whether printing a proof or a final document.
• A common interface for creating PDF files across CS3 components makes it easy to share PDF presets and create Portable Document Format (PDF) files, ready for print publishing.

Requirements

To follow along with this article, you will need the following software:

• Adobe® Photoshop® CS3
• Adobe® Creative Suite® 3
• Adobe® Illustrator® CS3
• Adobe® InDesign® CS3
• Adobe® Acrobat® 8 Professional

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