Converting Between Color Models

If you are working in the RGB color model and want to send it to a printer, you might need to convert your image to CMYK. To convert your image to a new color space, go to the main menu Image > Convert Image Color Space. You will see some options grouped under the Rendering Intent group. When you convert a document to CMYK, you will lose some color information. This is because the CMYK color space has less available colors than RGB. The Rendering Intent lets you determine how to handle this reduction of color.

• Perceptual (default) – Takes all of your values and scales them to fit in the converted color space. Since all of your colors change proportionally, your image will still look pretty good.
• Relative colorimetric – If a color is outside of the color gamut, it will be mapped to the closest color. If the color exists in the target color space, it will be left alone.
• Saturation – The saturation of the colors are preserved over other color attributes. This is useful when exact colors are needed such as in business logos.
• Absolute colorimetric – Tries to reproduce the exact colors that were used. This usually produces color banding or shifting that is undesirable.

Converting a Layer to a Different Color Model

You can convert a single layer to a different color model than the other layers. For example, you can have one layer be grayscale for your sketching and another layer be in RGB for painting. When you paint on grayscale layers, you will have a small performance increase since your computer doesn’t have to deal with colors. You can do this by going to the main menu Layer > Convert Layer Color Space.

Each layer has a color profile associated with it. While you can change your profile to something different on each layer, there will be extra calculations that go on under the hood. It is best to leave the color profile information alone and only set it at the image level.