An Effective Colour Management Architecture for Graphic Arts

This paper discusses the background to colour management and how the current ICC architecture may be improved to help meet Graphic Arts workflow and quality requirements - both in terms of cross-media reproduction and matching between proofs and prints. It suggests that an architecture that separates the various components of a single profile and concatenates the string of resultant profiles by a well-defined 'dumb' CMM would be far more versatile for cross-media reproduction, and discusses what is needed in the way of reference gamuts, profile information and control procedures to ensure colour matching. It also briefly reviews the desirability of baseline profiles that some proponents feel will be necessary to obtain consistency for some applications and what Graphic Arts will need to replace these. Finally a brief discussion is given as to how separation specific information (such as UCR/GCR) may be preserved when colour management is undertaken.