Color Management is certainly a hot topic these days, but certainly not the most user friendly thing to get to know. If you are editing images or creating design work using a computer, color management is now a very integral step in the creative process. But the single most difficult thing about it is that you can’t really see exactly what it’s doing. I remember installing the very first version of ColorSync when it first came out back in 1995 or so. I had very high hopes because it seemed like it was going to do a lot in terms of working with color in Photoshop. After completing the installation and setting my monitor profile in the ColorSync Control Panel I was stunned and amazed when absolutely nothing happened on my screen! That’s the thing about Color Management. It is usually working away invisibly in our graphic applications and on the operating system level of our computers. What I hope to accomplish with this short piece is to make some of the concepts of Color Management a bit more visual. It’s one thing to read about profiles and which ones you should use, but it’s even better if you can really see what profiles are doing. By examining some profiles and their gamuts you can visually get a better idea of how they fit into place in a digital workflow. My area of concentration will be profiles used in Adobe Photoshop because it is the most Color Management aware application around today. I would like to point out I’m no color scientist, but rather a creative artist trying to find out how color works on a realworld level. Usually any creative endeavor is always a marriage of art and technique, this is certainly the case with computer imaging. I find having a little more insight into the technical can make creative choices and decision making a lot more intuitive.

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