How Do Color Mangement Systems Work?

Let's go back to the metaphor we started with at the beginning of this chapter, in which we compared communicating in color to communicating in multiple languages. Color management systems act as interpreters. The profile is like the dictionary for a device's language and dialect. Profiles are used by the CMM, which translates data from one device's colors to another, via a device-independent color space. The CMM receives the necessary information about a device from the profiles and uses rendering intents to perform gamut mapping to produce color that is predictable from device to device. The API provides applications with access to all of these functions. Remember that it is not possible to have perfect color matches between devices due to differences in each device's gamut.