Handling colors with a rendering intent

A rendering intent determines how a color management system handles color conversion from one color space to another. The rendering intent you choose depends on whether colors are critical in an image and on your preference of what the overall color appearance of an image should be.

When Advanced Mode is selected in the Color Settings dialog box, Photoshop lets you choose a rendering intent in the Conversion Options area of the dialog box.

Perceptual

Aims to preserve the visual relationship between colors so it's perceived as natural to the human eye, even though the color values themselves may change. This intent is suitable for photographic images with lots of out-of-gamut colors.

Saturation

Tries to produce vivid colors in an image at the expense of color accuracy. This rendering intent is suitable for business graphics like graphs or charts, where bright saturated colors are more important than the exact relationship between colors (such as in a photographic image).

Relative Colorimetric

Compares the extreme highlight of the source color space to that of the destination color space and shifts all colors accordingly. Out-of-gamut colors are shifted to the closest reproducible color in the destination color space. Relative colorimetric preserves more of the original colors in an image than Perceptual.

Absolute Colorimetric

Leaves colors that fall inside the destination gamut unchanged. Out of gamut colors are clipped. No scaling of colors to destination white point is performed. This intent aims to maintain color accuracy at the expense of preserving relationships between colors and is suitable for proofing to simulate the output of a particular device.