Color Management with ICC Profiles : Can ’ t Live without It so Learn to Live with It

Managing and controlling color, from scanner to monitor to output devices, are serious issues for the printing and imaging industries. Accurate color control is vital for predictable quality of final product, whether printed or displayed. Costs of controlling color are significant. Printing has become much more science than art and any company, especially those involved in printing and other media, must have a presence on the World Wide Web. Thus, controlling color between input, display and print is more important than ever. As a result, spectrophotometers and colorimeters are now necessary tools throughout the industry. Color management systems have been developed to utilize these measurement devices to characterize the color of input, display and output devices. These hardware and software tools have not yet solved all problems of color reproduction, but have made possible quantification, which is the essential ingredient for controlling quality. Here we review color management, ICC profiling and the important players in this technology.