3. Color Essentials

People have many different ways of thinking about, talking about, and working with color, but there’s a notion that comes up again and again—that you can create any color by combining three primary colors. Art directors may feel comfortable specifying color changes with the terms hue, lightness, and saturation. Those who have always worked with color digitally may be more at home with RGB values. Scientists think about color in all sorts of strange ways, including CIE Lab, HSB (hue, saturation, and brightness), and LCH (lightness, chroma, and hue). And dyed-in-the-wool prepress folks think in CMYK dot percentages.

Although Adobe Photoshop tries to accommodate all these ways of thinking about color, many Photoshop users find themselves locked into seeing color in only one way, such as RGB. This is natural and understandable; we all have our own ways of thinking about color that matches the kind of work we do or how we learned. If you learn about other ways to see color, you can unlock much more of the power of Photoshop.