Hello, everyone Marianne here. I am glad to meet my fellow photographers and today I have a question about ICC profiling. Hopefully you'll be able to help me out. I just bought a new monitor and calibrated it with enclosed software and a colorimeter. I created a monitor ICC profile after calibrating. This is the first time I am calibrating a monitor. My main goal for calibrating is creating accurate colors when printing. I've read on many photography websites that calibrating and creating a monitor ICC profile is an ABSOLUTE MUST for ACCURATE COLOR PRINTING. And there is a lot of fuss about calibrating the monitor and creating an ICC profile. Here is my question - In Photoshop under the Edit menu there is an option - Assign Color Profile. If I click on this option it brings up a dialog box showing that a color profile has ALREADY been assigned to my image for example RGB or sRGB and then there is a dropdown menu with a list of available profiles INCLUDING THE ICC PROFILE I CREATED after calibrating my monitor. So I can pick the ICC profile I created from the list. Should I pick my ICC profile that I created after calibrating my monitor or the one that Photoshop assigned to the image is better? If the one that Photoshop assigned is better then why did we go through the whole pain of creating the ICC profile for the monitor, do we actually need it? Thank you very much for your help, any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Mare, the edit assign profile is for the image in particular and what color space is assigned to it. Different color spaces will have different color gamut ranges. The monitor profile you created needs to be assigned to your monitor, not the image itself. If you're on a Mac you'll find that in your system preferences, click on the monitor preference and then color and you should see your profile in the list where you can choose it.