2026: WOW TIME FLIES -- my rants are still centering on CS6 and OSX Lion 10.7 -- but I'm still making money in CS6 Photoshop 13, CS2 GoLive 8, Snow Leopard 10.6.8, 2011 Mac hardware to run them.

CS6 Ps is running fine on my 2019 iMacs under Mojave 10.14x with NVMe SSD - 128GB RAM - 8GB GPU.

I'm leaving this stuff up as some of the theory is still relevant (and it would be too time-consuming to remove).

Still can't bring my work to AI -- prefer to do my own photography, my own Photoshop work, my own designing, my own writing -- old dog, old school....

These Photoshop tutorials reference Adobe Creative Suite CC 2014 CS6 CS5.5 CS4 CS3 PS 14 13 12.1 11 10 9 8 7 6 PSCS: by author Gary Ballard is a working multimedia photojournalist and professional color management work-flow consultant based in San Diego, California, U.S.A.

- Albert Einstein

G's lay rants about basic theories behind color management:

Monitor Profile < Source Profile > Destination Profile

COLOR MANAGEMENT Basic theory and terminology behind Photoshop color management.

DOWNLOAD PDI HIGH RESOLUTION REFERENCE IMAGES -- now with ProPhoto & Whacked RGB calibration targets!

ASSIGN PROFILE VERSUS CONVERT TO PROFILE A tutorial learn how Photoshop deals with embedded profiles and color spaces.

WEB BROWSER COLOR MANAGEMENT TUTORIAL SEE ICC PROFILES IN ACTION you just need a Web browser.

ADOBE CAMERA RAW WORKFLOW FAQ.

HONOR MY EMBEDDED PROFILE Please!

THE COLOR MANAGEMENT CHAIN Photoshop Epson ColorSync.

16–BIT COLOR a Photoshop Scanning WorkFlow.

ADJUSTMENT LAYERS Work Flow.

RESOLUTION AND SHARPENING for inkjets Epson, HP professional workflows.

COLOR ONLY LOOKS BAD IN PHOTOSHOP Troubleshoot evaluate, fix bad monitor profiles.

Assuming you have your MONITOR PROPERLY CALIBRATED, ruled out known HARDWARE AND BUG ISSUES, spent some time reading about COLOR MANAGEMENT THEORY, observed COLOR PROFILES IN ACTION, practiced WORKING WITH ICC PROFILES, have a GOOD REFERENCE IMAGE and GOOD PRINT WORK FLOW established, performed SYSTEM MAINTENANCE and ran all updates — you shouldn't be having any wrong color problems that can't be quickly resolved by looking at the COLOR MANAGEMENT CHAIN.

sRGB IS THE CORRECT PROFILE FOR THE WEB Here's the PROOF!

SAVE FOR WEB COLOR SHIFTS Here's why color-brightness changes-shifts in Fireworks, Flash, ImageReady, Lightroom, Aperture, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari.

PS13 CS6 PRINTING TUTORIAL & Troubleshooting Guide Using Epson professional "Photoshop Manages Colors" & "Color Mode: Off (No Color Management)" work flow, formally known as No Color Adjustment"

PS12 CS5.5 PRINTING TUTORIAL & Troubleshooting Guide Using Epson professional "Photoshop Manages Colors" & "Color Mode: Off (No Color Management)" work flow.

FIREFOX HOW TO TEST & ENABLE "FULL COLOR MANAGEMENT" Value 1 in Firefox-Mozilla about:config gfx.color_management.mode Value1.

HOW TO HARDWARE-CALIBRATE MONITORS Tips & techniques for 'accurate' proofing in Photoshop.

WIDE-GAMUT LCD MONITORS EIZO ColorEdge, NEC, DELL UltraSharp broswer TEST PAGE for Mac OS X intense red saturation problems with untagged sRGB. If you are thinking about buying one of these high-gamut so-called Adobe RGB monitors on a Mac or PC, be forewarned your unmanaged system, application and Web browser color will turn cartoonish...great for Photoshop, not so good for anything else.

APPLE OS-X BASIC TROUBLESHOOTING & SYSTEM MAINTENANCE TIPS Create Spare User, Rule Out User Preferences, Defrag, Back Up, Clone Boot Hard Drive...

TROUBLESHOOT PHOTOSHOP How to de-activate, un-install, purge, re-install Photoshop, reset its user Preferences, test in a New User account, and a lot more...

PHOTOSHOP TWAIN PLUG-IN TROUBLESHOOTING Why can't I scan in Photoshop anymore? Why do professionals advise me to scan directly in the scanning software?

DO YOU EVER CONVERT COLORS INSIDE OF ACROBAT PRO?

APPLE SWITCHED TO 2.2 DEFAULT MONITOR GAMMA in 10.6 Snow Leopard — and System default space to sRGB in 10.7 Lion.

COLORSYNC: A Mere Color Management System What is ColorSync?
Recipes for Disaster: "COLOR MANAGEMENT OFF" -- "Emulate Photoshop 4" ColorSync Workflow for Photoshop (Lion, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Snow Leopard)

Adobe Photoshop Help PROGRAM ERRORS CS2 Tiger 10.4x:
SCRATCHDISK RAID 0

NEW CS6 CS5 CS4 Adobe Articles & Tutorials:

HOW TO TUNE PHOTOSHOP FOR PEAK PERFORMANCE CS5:
Jeff Tranberry's Digital Imaging Crawlspace / What type of Photoshop user are you?

HOW TO SETUP A GREAT PHOTOSHOP MACHINE:
At Photoshop World this week, performance testing lead Adam Jerugim presented a performance guide with hardware recommendations and information about the CS5 performance preferences...Operating Systems: Mac OS 10.6.4 and Windows 7 64-bit.

TROUBLESHOOTING FONTS IN CS5:
ADOBE: Damaged fonts can cause various problems in Photoshop, some of which don't appear to be caused by fonts. The (linked) solutions are listed in order of easiest, and most likely to locate the damaged font, to more challenging or time consuming...

OPTIMIZE PHOTOSHOP CS5 &CS4 PERFORMANCE Official Adobe guide.
Allocating memory 32-bit 64-bit processors, how much Ram can Photoshop 12 use, Scratch Disk, Cache levels...THIS IS A REALLY COMPLETE PHOTOSHOP GUIDE FOR CS4.

CS4 SUPPORTED VIDEO CARDS Official Adobe guide.
CS4 Photoshop has built-in support for OpenGL Engine. The minimum requirements seem to be 256mb Vram and Shader 3. The linked Adobe guide lists graphics display cards they tested for Photoshop CS4 for Mac OS MACTEL and Windows, also links to latest driver nVidia, ATI...

OPEN GL FEATURES CS5 - CS4 "Photoshop CS4 -CS5 leverage the graphics display card's GPU, instead of the computer's main processor (the CPU) to speed its screen redraw. For Photoshop to access the GPU, your display card must contain a GPU that supports OpenGL and has enough RAM to support Photoshop functions--at least 128 MB of RAM--and a display driver that supports OpenGL 2.0 and Shader Model 3.0..." (Adobe site). LYNDA.COM has a great movie tutorial that demonstrates Photoshop CS 4 new NAVIGATION OPENGL.

LEARN PHOTOSHOP CREATIVE SUITE FOUR - Editing Images in Lightroom The How to Series From Adobe http://tv.adobe.com, a PS movie tutorial pretsented by www.lynda.com/cs4.

OFFICIAL ADOBE UPDATER DOWNLOAD PAGES (includes CS4 TRYOUT):
Adobe Photoshop Mac UPDATES
Adobe Photoshop Windows UPDATES

Memory Allocation and Usage CS4-CS5 Adobe.com:
How Photoshop Allocates RAM
New capabilities with 64-bit Processors
Virtual Memory and Photoshop Scratch Disk
Determining How Much Scratch Disk Space
Out of Memory Errors
Maximum File, Hard Disk, Scratchdisk Sizes
Adjusted Refresh Plug-In
Bigger Tiles PlugIn

•••Photoshop Resource Links:

JOHN NACK ADOBE Principal Product Manager, Adobe Photoshop, Blog http://blogs.adobe.com

creativepro.com Bruce Fraser's articles page (a must review).

Russell Brown's tutorials russellbrown.com (see Tips & Techniques for Russell Brown's Epson Workflow QuickTime MOVIE Printing Tutorials)

Photoshop lynda.com

HUTCHCOLOR BRUCE FRASER'S hutchcolor.com DOWNLOAD scanning (.pdf) guide.

Stephen Marsh's giant Photoshop links www.sitemembers.ozemail.com.au

Check out PhotoKit™ pixelgenius.com, Bruce Fraser's A Complete Sharpening Workflow For Photoshop®.

The color management Bibles, available at: amazon.com:

The History of Photoshop, a PEI magazine article by Jeff Schewe:
10 YEARS OF PHOTOSHOP schewephoto.com (available in .pdf)

G-Forward:

I have little formal training with computers.
But I have BeenThereDoneThat on these subjects...and I have the bumps on my forehead to prove it!

These are my lay rants - my two cents on the subjects.

Please read the www.gballard.net site USER AGREEMENT, and site DISCLAIMER for legal issues regarding your use of the www.gballard.net site.

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