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Adobe Photoshop CS5 Tutorials
Color Correcting Photos / How RGB & CMYK Work
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS5 / Color Correcting Photos / How RGB & CMYK Work)
I just want to take a quick moment and explain to you exactly how the RGB or the red, green and blue color space works and also how the CMYK or the cyan, magenta yellow and black color space works. And I'm going to start off with RGB and what I did here, this an exercise that's not going to involve any sample files. It's going to be nice and easy for us here. What I did was I went and opened up my Color Palette so if you want to follow along here, you don't have to, but if you want to follow along, head to your Window Menu and look for your Color Palette and you should see RG and B color sliders inside your Color Palette and if you don't, head to your Color Palette Menu and just make sure to choose RGB Sliders and you'll wind up at the same spot that I'm at here. The RGB color space is what's referred to as an additive color space. In other words, we're going to add in amounts of red, add in amounts of green and blue, add them all in to wind up with a color, right? Now, the example that I always give whenever I'm trying to explain this, because this can get a little bit tricky to understand, is I use the metaphor of spotlights. Imagine you're standing in front of three spotlights; a red spotlight, a green spotlight and a blue spotlight and each of the spotlights has a lever on it, a gage that allows us to increase or decrease the intensity of the light that's coming out of the spotlight and this lever, this gage goes from zero to 255; zero being off and 255 being the maximum output. So if I turn all three spotlights off, the color I get is black. Now, inside my Color Palette, each of my sliders is all the way to the left. They're all set to zero right now and the color that I have in my foreground color is black. So everything's off. Now, you know, if I take all three spotlights and I crank them all the way up to maximum intensity, in other words all the way up to 255, then the color that I get is pure white because I'm looking at pure lightright? But what I can start to do is I can start to mix it up. I can say alright, give me half intensity on the red, give me no intensity and on the green and give me maximum intensity on the blue and I wind up with this sort of purplish color. That's sort of how it works anyway. So I hope that makes sense. The RGB color space is an additive color space. Now, how about CMYK; cyan, magenta, yellow and black? Well, that's a subtractive color space. Let me show you how this is going to work. I'm going to head to my Color Palette Menu and I'm going to switch to CMYK Sliders now and just make sure that all of your sliders are dragged to the left there, they're all set to zero and how it works here is it's a subtractive color space. The analogy I use here instead of spotlights is I use the analogy of an artist's paint palette when he's mixing paint pigment together to create new color and as you can see here, each channel or each color; cyan, magenta, yellow and black, has its own slider, its own independent slider and these sliders go from zero to a hundred percent. So if the artist comes along and mixes in a hundred percent cyan and a hundred percent yellow, then he's going to wind up getting green. Now, if he throws in let's say 50 percent magenta, crank this guy up here, we're going to get a darker green. Or if he reduces the amount of magenta and then brings in some black, we're going to get a darker green as wellright? So it's like mixing inks or mixing pigments on an artist's palette and you can experiment here a little bit. Now, again, if I mix in a hundred percent of all four colors, what I get is pure black. So it's the opposite to RGB, if that makes sense. Now, the final thing that I want to say here and I hope this is all making sense, is the RGB color space is used all over the place, from web design, blog design, onscreen presentations, video games, television, anything that's going to appear onscreen is going to be in the RGB color space. And typically anything that appears in print; magazines, newspapers, things like this, ads, that's in the CMYK color space. So CMYK is used in commercial printing and the RGB color space is used pretty much everywhere else. So I hope that makes sense for you.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS5 |
| Author: | Geoff Blake |
| SKU: | 34150 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-46-1 |
| Release Date: | 2010-08-06 |
| Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 95 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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