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Adobe CS2 Power Projects Tutorials

Creative Suite 2 Universals / Intro to Color

Subtitles of the Movie

I realized that we've already talked about the Adobe Color Picker. This segment focuses on something completely different. We're going to talk here about Color Theory. I realize that this isn't really part of the Creative Suite but as a Creative Suite user, you'll probably create documents for the web and for print. The color modes of both of these mediums varies tremendously. So that you understand a little bit more about what your doing and can kind of trouble shoot things a little bit better, lets start talking about color here. And we're going to start by talking about RGB. You'll see these three letters a lot. They stand for red, green and blue. Red, green and blue are the color components of light. And this is not a Photoshop principle. This is a real world life principle. When the sun beams down its beaming rays it's beaming down its light in the form of red, green and blue light. Now you'll notice with these sliders here that as we go to the right and we bump up more red, more green and more blue. They are all at full value, that is; 255, 255, 255, then the color we have is an end result of pure white. Now this makes sense if you have several spot lights and there all shining in the same spot and they are all at full blast it makes sense that the end result color is white. If we take these sliders down to the left all the way, getting rid of all red, all green and all blue light, then we have; 0, 0, 0 which is pure black. Which again, also makes sense. If we have spot lights and that's all the light we have in the room. We turn all those spotlights off all the way - well then yah, it's going to be black. It should be noted that Photoshop is primarily an RGB program. If you were in a different color mode a lot of features and functions of Photoshop will be grayed out. It will not be accessible. Now again, just a reminder, RGB is the abbreviation for red, green, and blue, the color components of light. However, if we're going to print we would typically use CMYK, the color components of ink. RGB and CMYK are complete opposites. This is probably easier to see if I take all these sliders up to 100% or in other words; 255, 255, 255. If we have RGB light and I take out all the red, then we essentially have the opposite of red. As you can see here, this is cyan. That's what the C stands for in CMYK. Likewise the opposite of green is magenta and the opposite of blue is yellow. Now RGB is often referred to as the additive model. And the way I remember that is that as we add more we get white. CMYK is referred to as a subtractive model meaning the more that we subtract the closer we get to white. Think of a blank piece of white paper. As you go to print it if you have 0% CMYK that paper is going to stay white. If however, you blast all of those sliders all of CMYK all the way up to 100% your going to have black. And actually in theory just using the opposite colors CMY should yield black but it doesn't. And that is where the K comes in. The K stands for Key which is an old printer term for Key or black. So because of impurities in inks it doesn't really match up. It doesn't make perfect black. So we use CMYK when we print to control the light reflected off our surface. I'm going to go to this fly-out here and select CMYK sliders to show you how this works. So you see 0% CMYK equals white. If we bump this all up 100% we're actually getting darker. Hence, CMYK is referred to as a subtractive color model. Now there are other color models. These are the two that you will primarily be dealing with as your working in the Creative Suite. Again RGB is for light meaning onscreen display. If the final output is going to be video or a computer screen such as on the web then you'll want to work in RGB. If the final output is print, in other words if it's using ink then you want to make sure that it is output in CMYK color. Now I realize that this is a big teaser - that this only scratches the very surface of color and color theory. But it's pretty much what you need to know to go through this training series and be successful.

Tutorial Information

Course: Adobe CS2 Power Projects
Author: Chad Perkins
SKU: 33760
ISBN: 1-933736-82-8
Release Date: 2007-05-17
Duration: 8 hrs / 111 lessons
Work Files: Yes
Captions: For Online University members only
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

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