How To Set Up Working Spaces in Photoshop or InDesign

Guarantee color accuracy by gaining a true understanding of working spaces

Many users of Adobe InDesign and/or Photoshop can sometimes overlook the importance of leveraging working spaces to their maximum potential. When print work demands color consistency for the sake of brand integrity (in advertising for instance), small variations can have hugely negative effects. Luckily, a few steps, and the right tools can save lots of time, money, and energy.

Working spaces, also called workspaces, are important to ensure that you are correctly editing images and selecting colors. We’ll dive deep below on how to use them, and why they’re so important.

Getting started with color profiles

It is important to set up documents correctly so that you have the most accurate experience as you work, and ensure that later color conversion from digital to print is seamless.

Programs such as Photoshop and InDesign use color profiles to specify how different color values should be interpreted. It is easy to forget that screens made of different material will display the same RGB (red, green, blue) or CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) values differently. Your screen may display R0 G0 B255 as a very bright blue, but another screen will have a darker blue even though the values are the same.

Here is an example of two monitor ranges. The maximum blue in the bigger range will look very different to the maximum blue in the other range, even if they both have the values R0 G0 B255.

The color profiles tell your monitor on what scale to display these colour values, which ensures colour consistency while editing, and later while printing.

If you did not use color profiles while editing, your experience of the material could be completely different to what your stakeholders or other designers can see, and also what ends up being printed. The profile tells your device and printer how to interpret the RGB and CMYK values you are looking at, so that your colors stay your colors throughout the process.

How to set up your InDesign and Photoshop for best results

While editing a file, the color profile you use is called a working space or a color space. It is important to set up working spaces in InDesign and Photoshop to assure that whatever gamut your monitor operates in, your artwork will have RGB and CMYK ranges that aren’t determined by your individual screen.

Here’s how to set up your working space:

1. In Photoshop and InDesign, set your color settings by clicking Edit > Color Settings.
2. We recommend using North America Prepress 2 (or Europe Prepress 3 if you are based in Europe). Your RGB working space is now Adobe RGB and your CMYK working space is U.S Web Coated (SWOP) v2 or Coated FOGRA39 (ISO 12647–2:2004)

a. However, if you are using Europe Prepress 3, we recommend customising your set-up a little, and using ISO Coated v2 for your CMYK working space as this is the official version of Coated FOGRA39.

3. We also recommend ticking the below, so that you get warned when you are opening a file that has a different color profile embedded, or does not have a profile assigned at all. If you do not tick these, you may end up discarding important data without knowing it, or converting to your color space without control of the process.

The working spaces mentioned above are standardized working spaces, which means they are not tied to one device, and won’t significantly affect the later possibilities or current appearance of your artwork like, say, using your monitor working space would. The benefit of using a standardized working space prior to sending your file off, is that if you want to reuse that same file for a different project/ printer/paper stock, you won’t have reduced its color range by working against a specific printer profile all along.

What to do when you send your material to print

When it is time to send your artwork to print, you can use a color management service such as xColor to convert from your standardized working space to the working space that your printer operates in. In this context it is usually called an ICC profile. The conversion takes into consideration the color values and range of your artwork, and finds the equivalent color values in your printer’s range. The ICC profile can vary from printer to printer and is dependent on the ink and paper used in the process.

Color management services make the process of converting much simpler. They yield more precise results than Photoshop and InDesign, and quicker and more cost-effective results compared to hiring a professional color manager or using a pre-press company. xColor is cloud-based — use it anywhere to ensure fast and accurate results that make your artwork look great in print.

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Let us take you through the process! Schedule a time for a demo writing to sales@xcolor.io