After shooting with your digital camera (of after scanning a piece of film), you will want to use Photoshop to fine-tune the colors and mood of the photos you took. Often, especially when shooting in raw format, your pictures will look a bit dull and washed out compared to the way they looked on the camera’s small LCD. This is entirely normal, for the camera is applying some fixes of its own to make to picture look “punchy” on the LCD, but the raw data awaits your manipulation to show its true “colors.” Photoshop offers you all the tools you need to accomplish your vision, but it requires a good deal of setting up before you can start adjusting, correcting and tweaking. Let’s start with that.

Setting up your computer
In order to be able to assess the color quality picture you are seeing on your computer screen, and make decisions about correcting its color, you need to make sure what you are looking at is actually what will print or display when you produce the final presentation copy of the image. We need to start by setting up your computer to a set of known calibration values, so that we can accurately judge what it is displaying. First, we will tell Photoshop which parameters to use in displaying color, then calibrate your monitor to display those colors, then finally move on to adjusting your printer match what you see on the monitor

Photoshop Color Settings
You need first to tell Photoshop how to interpret colors, and what parameters to use when displaying those colors. The following steps will set up what I consider to be the most desirable settings for color rendition. There are many parameters you can change, but most of them can be set correctly by accepting the defaults.

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