Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

29
Color Management
Whenever an artist in ancient Rome wanted to represent the color of clotted blood, he
reached for his jar of Tyrian purple, made from the secretions of a marine snail. This is
an early example of color management. We have come a long way since then, but the
example certainly illustrates that the concept is not new. In Roman times, color management
was “pigment dependent,” hence somewhat limited. In our times, until very
recently, it was “device dependent,” meaning that you could control the color of the end
product providing you used equipment designed specifically to work together. But now,
color management has taken a giant leap forward. The human perception of color has
been codified in such a way that each stage of color reproduction, from capture to print,
can be done “to the numbers.” You can use any camera, monitor, or printer, as long as
each one has a color profile that can be passed across to the other devices. After starting
at a snail’s pace two thousand years ago, color management has finally arrived.
Overseeing the growth of color management is the International Color Consortium
(ICC), a body formed in 1993 by a small group of manufacturers, including Apple,
Adobe, and Eastman Kodak. Their aim from the outset was to create an open architecture
based on international color standards that would allow color-management systems
to work with all devices, even those that, at the time of image input, have not yet been
chosen for the output. The work of the ICC, now a body with more than 70 members,
has been outstandingly successful and its profile specification (V4 at the time of writing)
has been approved as an International Standard, ISO 15076.