Many color modes exist within Photoshop that are ready to work with. Without question the most well known of them is the RGB mode. RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue, which are called primary colors. When combined, these three colors can create a palette of a whopping 16.8 million colors. RGB is also the color standard for publishing images on the Internet because RGB is most suited for displaying images on a monitor screen. The three colors have a value of 255, so adjusting these values with figures between 1 and 255, makes up for 16.8 million colors. When all three colors are set to 255 a shade of gray is displayed.

Adobe Photoshop also comes pre equipped with other color modes, one of them is the CYMK mode. This mode is typically used for creating imagery destined to be printed on paper. CYMK is based on the quality of the paper used, the quality to absorb light that is.

Using CMYK in Photoshop works similar to using the RGB mode. By altering the values the colors are combined. Unlike RGB that uses three colors, CYMK uses four colors to mix. These colors are cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

Deciding what color mode to use is required before the actual image is created in Photoshop as converting existing images usually leads to unacceptable loss of quality. In order to play it safe, when in doubt select RGB modus this looks good on the screen of the computer but also on paper. RGB also supports the most file formats including .jpg and .gif variants, which to date are the most popular and most used formats.

Another mode that is frequently used in Photoshop is for the creation of colorless images using the grayscale mode. To select the desired shade of grey all a user needs to do is enter the appropriate value between 1 and 256, where zero stands for pitch black.

There are several other color modes available in Photoshop besides the ones mentioned. Modes like duotone and tritone color mode, these are only used on rare occasions. For normal use of Photoshop Grayscale, RGB and CMYK are all the color modes a user needs to create almost any type of image.

M.A.H.

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