In this tutorial I'm going to show you have to change several settings in photoshop to get the best possible workflow.

The info palette is a very helpful palette that helps you analyze the current contents of an image and the "proposed" contents of an image. So, for example, if you're playing with the levels dialog box you can see the new changes made to the image before you confirm the change.

Press F8 or go to Window > Info to bring up your info palette.

For the most part the info palette is pretty good, but I don't like the tool hints section. I already know all that information. So I'm going to go ahead and remove that.

Click the arrow to the right and select Palette Options...

Set the following settings below.

Note: Your info palette may look different than mine.

All right now let's do something about our background color!

If you havn't already press, F to enlarge your canvas so it fills up the whole screen.

Make sure that you can see the color palette by pressing F6 or going to Window > Color

Click the arrow to the right and notice all the additional options. Click through these and observe what they do.

Select Grayscale from the list and change the slider to 75%.

With the new gray foreground color set, select the Paint Bucket Tool

Hold down Shift and Left-Click anywhere on the background.

Tadaa! Your canvas background changed!

All right, now that we're at it, let's talk a little more about color. . .

One crucial thing that often gets overlooked in photoshop is how it handles (and thinks about) color.

Photoshop supports many different ways to display color. This is to allow flexibility when handling different materials and mediums. For example, let's say you were going to print your image. Well first of all, your printer uses the CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key/black) palette. So you would want to adjust photoshop so that it displays the image as if it were printed on white paper.

Open up the color settings dialog by pressing Shift - Ctrl - K or going to Edit > Color Settings.

Photoshop will automatically come with some default settings. These settings aren't bad but they aren't great either there's more we can do to make them better.

Under Working Spaces change the RGB option to Adobe RGB (1998). This profile handles color management the best in Adobe Photoshop as it provides a much wider range of available colors for the program to work with. This is particularly suited to projects that will be printed.

Under Color Management Policies change the Gray option to off. This turns off color management for grayscale images.

Click the More Options button and you will see additional parameters.

If you look above, notice that intent is set to Relative Colormetric. What this means is photoshop is trying to find the closest match to any selected color in photoshop. So for instance you select the RGB values 255 232 40 (a bright yellow). Photoshop runs the selected engine (Adobe ACE) and applies those settings (Relative Colormetric) to get the closest color to those RGB values.

Did you get that? Read it again, it's not that complicated.

In fact, photoshop also uses this to convert RGB values to CMYK values.

Relative Colormetric can cause problems however. In a photograph we want the transitions to look as good as possible, we want nice smooth gradients. Therefore click the Intent drop down menu and choose perceptual this will generate much better results for your images.

Press Ok

Step 2 : Color Profiles.