color management

The goal of any color management workflow is WYSIWYG or What You See Is What You Get. The idea is to match the original, whether scanned, photographed or just displayed on a monitor to the printed image.

So why is this so hard to attain? Basically, what you see as a human is not what other devices see. Digital cameras and scanners do not see as many colors as we do. Add to that the fact that the monitor yet again sees color in different ways than input devices. Finally the printer can not print all the brilliant colors your monitor displays in the first place, so you have a mess of varied color gamuts usually resulting in unpredictable results. Since all the digital devices speak a different color language, we need a translator.

Color Management Systems or CMS, is how devices communicate color, to obtain reliable results and prevent hours of frustration and wasted media.

CMS, is a software solution first introduced on the MAC, which is one reason MAC computers are still so popular with digital artists. Some artists (we know a few very well) actually prefer to disregard WYSIWYG or obtain it by comparing their printer output to the monitor and then adjusting their monitor to match the print. This type of adjustment is called reverse profiling and results in a closed loop color workflow. Which simply means that you're fine as long as you use your system , but your images displayed or printed on other systems will never match. With CMS, not only can you get close to WYSIWIG but in theory should obtain cross platform color matching. So the same file opened on my computer screen displays colors as they appear on your computer screen. Great, but how does it happen ?

As of 1993, it happens using ICC Color Management.

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