Color

The International Color Consortium was established in 1993 by eight industry vendors for the purpose of creating, promoting and encouraging the standardization and evolution of an open, vendor-neutral, cross-platform color management system architecture and components. The outcome of this co-operation was the development of the ICC profile specification.

The intent of the International Color Consortium® profile format is to provide a cross-platform device profile format. Device profiles can be used to translate color data created on one device into another device’s native color space. The acceptance of this format by operating system vendors allows end users to transparently move profiles and images with embedded profiles between different operating systems. This permits tremendous flexibility to both users and vendors. For example, it allows users to be sure that their image will retain its color fidelity when moved between systems and applications. Furthermore, it allows a printer manufacturer to create a single profile for multiple operating systems.

The ICC specification is now widely used and has been specified in many international and other de-facto standards. It has itself recently been published as an International Standard, ISO 15076-1:2005. The specification continues to evolve and the current version represents a major improvement over the older versions. Profiles conforming to the new specification are called version 4 (v4) profiles. There are many advantages of v4 profiles, and all vendors of color management products are strongly urged to upgrade their products to be v4 compatible.