Why Color Management Matters

Color management is really just a way of creating a level playing field so that all of the devices in your workflow have a better idea of how every other device displays color. It doesn't change the colors that each device produces, but instead lets one device tell another how wide a range of colors it can produce, and how those colors should look. All of that information flows back to your Mac, which acts like a color translator and figures out how to best display those colors on your computer monitor.

Color management also deals with the radically limited number of colors we can print versus the number of colors we can see and create on our Macs. A printed piece can show only a subset of the colors that your monitor can display.

Each device in a color-managed workflow has a special type of file called an ICC profile, or device profile, that describes the range of colors it is capable of displaying. This includes your display, scanners, printers, and other output devices, such as digital presses and even offset presses used in print shops. We'll talk more about device profiles shortly.

A closed-loop color-management system, or a workflow in which every device is properly calibrated and includes device profiles, will save you time and money because you don't have to waste your resources blindly modifying colors to get your outputs to look right. If there is a color-related problem, you'll know just by looking at your screen.

Playing with Color Can Burn You

Some service bureaus and print shops manually tweak document colors to match a client's idea of what something should look like. Once you do that, you have permanently tied the document to the device you are printing it on, as well as the precise lighting conditions when the output is created. If your client wants you to run the job again later, but the device you originally printed it on isn't available, the colors will not match and are likely to be substantially different from those in the original run.

ICC Demystified

The International Color Consortium (ICC) was established in 1993 by Apple and several other companies to develop an open and cross-platform system for describing how different devices display color. When a company designs a new product for the design and print market, such as a scanner or color printer, it can include an ICC profile so that the device will fit into your existing color workflow.