Using color management when printing

Photoshop Elements uses pixels to represent images. When you view an image on your monitor, pixels are displayed using red, green, and blue light. When you print an image on a printer, pixels are reproduced using colored inks. Because your monitor operates in a different color space than your printer, the colors you see on your monitor can vary drastically from those in the printed image. Color management provides a solution to this dilemma by using color profiles to ensure that the colors remain consistent. (See About color management.)

Converting colors to a different color space involves translating the source or image colors to accommodate the color space of the destination printer. These translation methods are known as rendering intents because each technique is optimized for a different intended use of color graphics.

To color-manage an image while printing:

1. Choose File > Print Preview.
2. Make sure Show More Options (located below the image preview area) is checked.
3. Choose Color Management from the pop-up menu. The Source Space section of the dialog box displays the image's color profile.
4. In the Print Space section of the dialog box, choose an option for Profile:
• Choose Same As Source if you want the printer to print the color of the image's color profile without converting it. This option will not take any printer profiles into account.
• Choose Printer Color Management or PostScript Color Management if you want to manage color conversions using the print driver. PostScript Color Management is only available when printing to a PostScript device.
• If available, choose a predefined color profile for your printer. These profiles are installed with graphics applications and print drivers. Choosing a predefined profile will result in an automatic color conversion when printing.
5. Under Print Space, for Intent, choose a rendering intent:

Perceptual

is most suitable for photographic images. Perceptual preserves the visual relationship between colors that is perceived as natural to the human eye, although the color values themselves may change.

Saturation

is suitable for business graphics, where the exact relationship between colors is not as important as having bright saturated colors. Saturation creates vivid color at the expense of accurate color.

Absolute Colorimetric

is useful when you want to match the color of one kind of paper on another kind of paper, and have the most accurate match of all the colors. For example, you'd use Absolute Colorimetric to reproduce the appearance of a sheet of newsprint onto a sheet of bright white paper. The bright white paper would be printed over with a dingy gray to simulate the actual newsprint appearance.

Relative Colorimetric

is useful when you want to match inks printed on various paper types. For example, you can use this option to match inks printed on newsprint, but not the color of newsprint itself.