The History of the ICC

The History of the ICC In recent years hopes of resolving the chaos of color reproduction in open systems and the World Wide Web have slowly become focused on de facto industry standards. Apple Computer led an initiative starting in the spring of 1993, known as the ColorSync Consortium, to resolve this chaos. Over the next eighteen months, this initiative produced an open, cross-platform device color characterization profile format specification based on the Apple ColorSync profile format and set the groundwork for unambiguous interaction among color devices and vendors in open systems. The following year was spent transforming this informal consortium into the International Color Consortium (ICC), a formal, non-profit organization. The next eighteen months were spent establishing clear goals for the consortium and struggling with intellectual property issues. Following this effort, the last six months have seen the genesis of new work to inventory all known problems with the ICC specification, create a set of reference implementation and establish guidelines for conformance testing. If these initiatives are successful, it appears that the ICC might finally meet many of its ambitious initial goals. As founding chairperson of the ColorSync Consortium, color architect for ColorSync 2 and recent past chairperson of the ICC, I have been intimately involved in all of the developments described above. I have also been involved in other related open color standards activities. This paper represents my personal viewpoint on these developments and the ICC in general. It does not necessarily represent the official position of the International Color Consortium, Apple Computer or Hewlett-Packard Company. Introduction – Before ColorSyncTM In recent years hopes of resolving the chaos of color reproduction in open systems and the World Wide Web have slowly become focused on the de facto industry standards. It might help to understand the current status of digital color reproduction by briefly examining how this field has evolved. The field of digital color reproduction is a congruence of several much older industries merging together. Each of these industries has their individual aspects of color reproduction that have evolved within the constraints of their particular production workflows. These industries include; broadcast television, motion pictures, slide reproduction, still photography, photofinishing, computer graphics, desktop publishing, paint formulation, presentation graphics, multimedia presentation and graphic arts. Color Science has provided a scientific foundation for all of these industries with varying degrees of significance, but each industry has extended this foundation with empirical results that are specialized to its particular needs. Thus, each of these industries individually encompasses a significant body of knowledge with respect to color reproduction issues. Much has been previously written about the traditional aspects of each field, usually from an analog point of view. In addition, researchers in color science have continued to advance the scientific foundations over the last several decades quite independently from any of these industries. Unfortunately until quite recently most of these efforts have also been independent of modern computer operating systems and digital networks. This has caused significant transition problems between the traditional methods and the constraints imposed by open computing environments and in particular the World Wide Web. The advent of digital color processing applications in open systems, and in particular the World Wide Web, has forced all of these industries into working within open computing environments and with each other. This created a new technology field—digital color reproduction. This relatively new field has inherited many of the methods and standards from each of its contributing industries. This is in addition to contributions from researchers in the color science community and in combination with the constraints imposed by the various software operating systems, networks, applications and devices that compose the digital computing environment today. The tensions between the traditional industries with each other, and along with the new digital technology, have created an interesting and often conflict-filled new technical environment for digital color reproduction. Most of the current practitioners trace their experience directly to either one of the color or computer industries listed above and many claim authority in setting direction and standards in this new field. Some traditional imaging companies feel threatened by the control of color by operating system venders or other traditional imaging industries. There has been a great reluctance to open up solutions for the betterment of the end-users. This has created an amalgam of solutions for end-users, none of which have fully answered the desire to have transparent, predictable color reproduction and most of which are incompatible with each other. In particular, the current chaos in this new field can be attributed to a few companies who had control or near monopolies in a single one of the many traditional analog imaging industries. In this new digital color reproduction field, these companies are fighting to survive. These same traditional analog companies are often the most vocal opponents to open standards for digital color reproduction. This is exemplified by attacks on open standards activities without constructive counter-proposals. Some of this resistance is due to a strong business strategy based on pro-