What Is System-Level Color Management?

What Is System-Level Color Management?

You learned in Chapter 1 that color management systems arose out of the need for laypersons to ensure color predictability in the desktop publishing environment, rather than relying on traditional experts trained in proprietary imaging systems. You also learned that the first color management systems were developed by a variety of competing companies which meant that they used proprietary profile formats and interfaces that made them difficult to use with other tools and applications. The International Color Consortium was formed to establish color management standards to help foster color compatibility among devices and software. These standards are now widely supported by color-imaging hardware and software vendors, as well as platform vendors such as Microsoft and Apple.

Without system-level color management, each application and device vendor would need to implement color management itself. This would likely result in a great deal of incompatibility between various devices and applications, not to mention that smaller vendors might not have the resources to implement comprehensive color management. One solution is to integrate a color management system into the operating system so that all devices and applications can use its capabilities in the same manner.

Microsoft integrated color management into the Windows operating system primarily to provide fundamental and automated color management capabilities to the applications and devices that support it. As a result, device manufacturers and software vendors were easily able to implement color management in their products in a consistent fashion. While most of the functionality of ICM is transparent to end users, occurring behind the scenes, ICM provides the foundation for predictable and accurate color in Windows.

Applications use ICM by calling the ICM application programming interface (API) for specific color management functions. These functions include matching color between device profiles and providing profile information for a specific device attached to the system. In some cases, ICM provides all the color management support in an application; in others, such as Adobe Photoshop, the application has its own color management but interacts with ICM for certain functions.

The various components ICM, applications, printer drivers, and color management tools such as profile creators all function together to create a color-managed workflow, or a process of moving color data from capture and creation to manipulation and then to output, all with consistency and predictability.