Chapter 5. Creating Color Managed Workflows

Perhaps the greatest challenge to design professionals is getting color on printed output to look like the color displayed on computer monitors. Artists can easily overcome common design dilemmas such as working around font problems, learning functional aspects of applications software, avoiding pitfalls related to image handling, and a host of other nuisances that hinder progress. But when it comes to color matching, the problems are more complicated and the solutions are often misunderstood and obscure.

Fortunately, Adobe has been working for several years on creating a common color engine that can be shared among imaging applications. The result of Adobe's efforts is exemplified in the CS4 applications. All the CS4 programs share the same Adobe Color Engine (ACE) that takes you one step closer to reliable color-matching among application documents, your computer monitor, and the output devices you use. In addition, once you set up your color-viewing workspace and color profiles you can use Adobe Bridge to synchronize the same color settings among most of the CS4 applications. In this chapter, we cover some fundamental information related to color management among the Adobe CS4 applications.

Color management is a complex topic. An accurate description for identifying all the variables related to rendering reliable color is well beyond ...

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