Selecting color modes and Resolution

Selecting a color mode

A color mode, also known as color space, determines how Photoshop
displays and prints an image. You choose a different color mode
(based on models using in publishing) for different tasks. You can
choose a color mode while you create a new document or change a
color mode for an existing document. The common color modes
include:
Grayscale: Best for printing black and white and duotone images.
This mode uses one channel and has a maximum of 256 shades of
gray.
RGB (Red, Green, and Blue): Best for online and multimedia color
images. RGB are also the primary colors on a monitor.
CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black): Best for commercial
printing color images.
LAB (Luminosity A and B Channels): Best for performing image
correction. This mode puts all grayscale information on the L channel
and splits the colors on the A and B channels.

Selecting Image Resolution:

Photoshop works primarily with raster documents. Raster
documents are images composed of pixels. A pixel is a unit of
information that holds the color and detail information of the image.
Thinking of a photoshop image as a brick wall, with the individual
bricks in the wall representing the individual pixels in the image, is an
excellent way to envision a photoshop document. Documents
opened in photoshop have a specific resolution. The resolution of the
image, along with its width and height, represents how many pixels
the image contains. Since pixels (the brick in a wall) represent
information, the more pixels a document contains, the more
information Photoshop has to manipulate or enhance the image.
When working with images, its always a good idea to start with a
larger image size. You can always reduce the size of the image
(subtract pixels) without losing any quality. If you need to enlarge an
image, you run the risk of losing image quality. When you enlarge an
image, the number of pixels doesn’t increase as the image does, so
the pixels become larger which mean a rougher image.