Color Modes
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PSDTUTS Photoshop Wiki / Photoshop Tutorials / Color Modes
The color mode you’ve selected determines the color model Photoshop uses when dealing with your image. Color modes determine the number of colors and channels available to you.
Color modes can be selected through the dialogue box that appears when you create a new image, or via the menu under Image > Mode. It’s best to decide which color mode suits the job from the start.
Bitmap – bitmap images are black and white. There are no grays in between, just two tones pure and simple. Bitmap is the best choice for black and white line drawings, simple logos and other images that need to be crafted exclusively in black and white.
Grayscale – grayscale images are the next step up from bitmap with 256 colors – black, white and all the grays in between. This is what most people think of when you refer to a “black and white” image. You might use this setting when you’re scanning old photos, for instance.
Duotone – despite the name, duotone supports between one and four inks and is primarily used for multitone printing. For instance, home users might use duotone instead of grayscale since consumer-level printers are typically better at printing in color than black and white.
Indexed – an indexed color model is a user-defined palette of 256 colors, designed to reduce the size and complexity of images so that they’re ready for the web. Indexed images don’t look good when they’re printed, but suit the screen.
RGB – this is the color mode used by most screens and televisions. If you get up close to your TV you’ll see the tiny red, green and blue pixels forming certain colors. Since this is the technology most screens use, this is the most common color mode and provides the broadest range of color to the user.
CMYK – if you own a printer you’ll probably recognize the use of cyan, magenta, yellow and black (K stands for "Key", which is black), since most printers use these four tone to produce color images. If you’re printing your image, this color mode will produce the most accurate results, though some screens and even operating systems don’t always display it correctly, because your monitor works in RGB mode. Mac OS X is better at compensating for the difference than other systems.
Lab Color – this was a standard created in order to capture colors more realistically than RGB and CMYK, which display differently from device to device, and make it possible to send images from one device to another knowing that the colors remain the same for each viewer.
Multichannel – like RGB, multichannel uses several channels to determine the colors in an image, but in this mode they can be configured to use any color you wish. This is like a custom color mode.
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