InDesign: What is Configuring Color Management?

Configure Color Management
In the past, configuring color management seemed to require a PhD in spectrophotometry. It’s much easier now in general, but especially if you use InDesign as part of the Creative Suite.

Bridge Color Management Sets
We’ve talked about Adobe Bridge a couple of times now primarily in the context of asset manager. It does much more, as I intimated, and Adobe’s intent is that Bridge becomes the central hub of your Creative Suite experience—indeed, of your entire workflow. Toward that end, color management across all individual CS3 version applications is managed inside Bridge rather than within InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, which keeps color display results almost identical between the individual applications. On the Edit menu in Bridge, you’ll find Creative Suite Color Settings, which opens an extremely simplified interface to apply full sets of ICC profiles and color management options to all CS3 applications simultaneously

In the Suite Color Settings dialog, click on one of the four friendly, plain language sets, and then click Apply. Behind the scenes, all applications will then be synchronized to use the following color management settings:

Monitor Color Used for onscreen and video projects without CMYK colors.
· RGB Working Space (Your monitor’s ICC/ICM profile)
· CMYK Working Space U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2
· RGB Policy Off
· CMYK Policy Off
· Profile Mismatches Ask When Opening
· Missing Profiles N/A
· Rendering Intent Relative Colorimetric
· Black Point Compensation Yes

North America General Purpose 2 Large RGB and CMYK gamut profiles compatible with (but not optimized for) typical print output devices in North America. Will not warn when profiles do not match.
· RGB Working Space sRGB IEC61966-2.1
· CMYK Working Space U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2
· RGB Policy Preserve Embedded Profiles
· CMYK Policy Preserve Numbers (Ignore Linked Profiles)
· Profile Mismatches N/A
· Missing Profiles N/A
· Rendering Intent Relative Colorimetric
. Black Point Compensation Yes

North America Prepress 2 Similar to North America General Purpose 2 except that profile mismatches will generate warnings, it uses a very large RGB gamut profile, and CMYK colors in linked assets will be preserved to the exclusion of separate profiles assigned to the assets.
· RGB Working Space Adobe RGB (1998)
· CMYK Working Space U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2
· RGB Policy Preserve Embedded Profiles
· CMYK Policy Preserve Numbers (Ignore Linked Profiles)
· Profile Mismatches Ask When Opening & When Pasting
· Missing Profiles Ask When Opening
· Rendering Intent Relative Colorimetric
· Black Point Compensation Yes

North America Web/Internet Uses a large gamut RGB profile purportedly representative of the color values available to the upper average of all monitors in use to access the Web. Any RGB colors will be converted from other profiles to the one defined as this set’s RGB Working Space.
· RGB Working Space sRGB IEC61966-2.1
· CMYK Working Space U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2
· RGB Policy Convert to Working Space
· CMYK Policy Preserve Numbers (Ignore Linked Profiles)
· Profile Mismatches Ask When Opening & When Pasting
· Missing Profiles N/A
· Rendering Intent Relative Colorimetric
· Black Point Compensation Yes

The four sets shown in the Suite Color Settings dialog are the most common for those who can’t (or won’t) profile their devices to obtain specific ICC profiles.

I’m asked often—I mean, very often, What are the default color management options should I use for
_________ design work?

My answer: Profile your particular monitor, scanner, camera, and printers; use those as defaults.
Them: No, what generic profiles should I use?
There are no “generics” in color management. There’s no generic language to unite the delegates of the UN Security Council. The only way their discussions or color management works is if interpreters listen to input in native languages and then convert verbatim into the next delegate’s or device’s native language. If, before you can leave this page, you absolutely must have something akin to “generic” settings in a process that has no definition for the word, then use one of the four sets above—whichever comes closest to describing what you’re doing in InDesign and its brethren. And then hope really hard that the output comes close to the colors you envisioned.

The Show Expanded List of Color Settings Files toggles 19 additional pre-configured sets. A few are the sets that were available in previous incarnations of Creative Suite (for instance, North America General Purpose [1]) as well as several European or Japanese defaults similar to the first four for North America.