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The Problem - Maintaining Colour Accuracy
Whatever your area of interest, you will at some time have had problems with colour accuracy. The photograph of your dog, taken on your new digital camera, which ended up looking completely different when viewed on your monitor. Or the design that you spent hours putting together that looked completely different when printed on your desktop printer. Without any form of management in place, colour becomes subjective and open to interpretation, instead of the science that it actually is.
As you are probably aware, different devices capture and produce colour in different ways, which is known as its ‘colour space’. The two that you are most likely familiar with are CMYK and RGB. Scanners and monitors use RGB, whilst most printers use CMYK to produce colour. The problem with these two colour spaces is that they are both ‘device dependent’. What this means is, if you take two different printers and output the same file to each one, you will most likely end up with different results. If you don’t, you have been very lucky! The same can be said for scanners, monitors and digital cameras. This can best be summed up with the human eye, which forms colour using RGB. The interpretation of colour from one person’s eye to the next will differ. So, without any form of colour management in place, you have no way of ensuring that an image displayed on your screen will look the same when printed.
This is easily shown in the following diagram.
As you can see, in a non-colour managed workflow the colour accuracy of an image is left completely to chance. It is a fingers crossed approach, which usually means waste in time, materials and money!
The Solution - The ICC Profiled & Colour Managed Workflow
To find a solution to the problem of colour fidelity, eight industry leading vendors (incl. Adobe, Apple, IBM and AGFA) formed The International Color Consortium in 1993, to create and promote the standardisation of an open, cross platform colour management system. The main outcome of this cooperation was the development of the ICC profile specification.
At the heart of colour management is the ability to ‘profile’ each device within your own working environment, including digital cameras, scanners, displays, proofing devices and printers. Each ICC profile contains information describing the accuracy of the device, plus the range of colours it can read, display or produce, known as a ‘colour gamut’. This enables images and artwork to pass through your workflow, between systems and applications, and retain its colour fidelity.
The result - consistent, accurate colour as illustrated here:
Next : The Benefits of Colour Management ->
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