Datasheet

We repeat these color concepts a great deal in this book as we work our way
through color management. Editing a file to change overall color, brightness,
and contrast often affects the hue, saturation, and brightness of the colors in
your file. Understanding how to define those changes can make the rest of
the book far easier to understand.
Color space
Throughout this book, we continually refer to the term color space. Color
space
is a way to numerically describe color on computers. Color space is
also often referred to as a
color model. RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) is a color
space. CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK) is a different color space.
HSB (Hue, Saturation, and Brightness) is a color space that describes color as
we define it in the preceding sections.
For most purposes, because Elements is limited in the number of color
spaces that you can view, we pretty much stick with the RGB color space
throughout this book.
Color gamut
Another term you find frequently used in this book is color gamut. Color
gamut
is simply the entire range of color within a given color space. We might
use a phrase such as “outside the color gamut,” which simply means that a
particular color isn’t contained within the range of color for a particular
color space. As a result, you can’t see the color on your monitor, and you
can’t print the color on your printer.
You might have a color visible on your monitor because it fits within the
monitor color gamut, but the color may not print on your color desktop
printer. The color isn’t within the printer’s color gamut.
Clipping
Quite often, we talk about colors or tones being clipped, which means that
the value is cut off. A color that’s clipped, for example, won’t print. When
Elements prints a photo that has some color clipped, the print shows you the
closest color to the clipped value. Beyond that value, the clipped colors
aren’t printed.
Clipping also relates to image tones (or grays). If we say that a very light or
dark tone is clipped, for example, the print appears with some whites and
blacks lost. This loss of tone results in a loss of detail in highlights (whites)
and shadows (blacks).
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Chapter 1: Understanding Color
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