Idaho Airships, Inc.

This morning (2/29/08-Happy Leap Year!) I was presenting for 3 hours on color management to the graphics and photography departments at a customer’s office building. The demonstration involved Softproofing, Clipping displays, and Out-of-Gamut displays…then the world fell apart.

This post is dedicated to Miss Briana Lee.

During an image manipulation following the above demonstrations I set a Fill Layer to a very Hot Pink (255, 0, 255), even going so far as to demonstrate the Gamut Warning and resolution in the Color Picker (although I did not correct the violative color…that’s a hint). In some applications where I’m using Layer Transparency on various copies of Image Layers and such, I use a Hot Pink underlayment as a sort of warning that my Image Layers are not producing a final opacity of or near 100%.

For whatever reason, my Hot Pink Fill Layer was gray. 128/128/128 gray, and it wouldn’t change. Was it Rasterized? Yes. Was it opaque? Yes, too. I tried overlaying a Gradient, I tried drawing on the Layer (again, with the Hot Pink)…and nothing worked.

After looking terribly confused for 30 seconds-maybe more-I realized what the problem was. If you fancy yourself a Photoshop Holmes, please take a minute and think about what the problem might have been.

Interlude:

Is color management necessary on this very neutral image? Yes it is: Consider the white point (paper white) and black point (ink black, black point compensation), as well as the fact that all of those grays are actually independent Red, Green, and Blue Channels which are differentially affected by conversion to an Output Profile. Life just can’t be simple, can it?

Now for the answer to the riddle. During the demonstration above I had toggled on the Out of Gamut Warning (Shift-Ctl-Q by default, Ctl-Q on my custom layout), which converts all gamut-violative display colors to display as gray, and had inadvertently left it activated. Thus, my Hot Pink Fill Layer was forced to gray-and unless I had tried Filling, Overlaying, or Painting in a nonviolative color (consider the Blending Mode when thinking about this…), it was going to stay that way.

Solutions?

Well, there’s always the argument for simply abandoning my middle-aged ways, but that’s physiologically impossible. I used to use what I consider to be a very clever technique to indicate various conditions that might not be obvious in my image-I’d use Actions to set up the condition (e.g. Insert Menu Item) and include the production of a code-colored dot in an opaque Layer-manually stamped, since the Brush wouldn’t record-indicating that the condition was active.

L