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@jgarber
Created August 9, 2009 21:06
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Color management with Photoshop and Illustrator
I struggled with color management all day (or you might say, for years now).
Here's what I did:
Read http://www.viget.com/inspire/the-mysterious-save-for-web-color-shift/.
He's exactly right. Doesn't cover Illustrator, though. Here's what I figured
out:
Calibrate your monitor. I use Huey Pro. I use a color temperature of D65 and a
Gamma of 2.2.
Look at your EPS. Try to figure out what profile was used to create it. Before
you open anything, in Illustrator set that to be the working color space and
check everything with regards to prompting.
Open the EPS (which has no profile) and convert it to what was used to create
it (in my case it was Adobe RGB). Save as PSD or if you have slices, save them
as JPEGs at 100% quality and embed ICC profile but don't convert to sRGB (on
the little flyout in Save for Web).
Set Photoshop up with your monitor profile and have it prompt you. Open your
export/save-for-web from Illustrator in Photoshop. Convert to the working
space (your monitor profile). Save for web in the desired format.
Probably could have also done the Monitor Color preset in Illustrator, but
then it wouldn't have asked me to assign a profile when it was missing. I
probably could have assigned it after opening.
Never in this process did I preview proof colors. In Illustrator it would have
been wrong and in Photoshop it should have been the same since my working
space was the monitor's profile.
At the end, open your raster thumbnail of the EPS (if you got one from
iStockPhoto) in Preview and compare it to your final output in Firefox 3.0
(you can enable ICC profiles in 3.0 and it might be by default in 3.5, but
don't). They should almost match even though Preview is ICC-aware and is
reading a file with an embedded ICC profile and Firefox is ICC-ignorant and is
reading a file with no embedded profile.
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