Color Management: Current Practice and the Adoption of a New Standard

Historically, managing color has been a very time consuming and costly process in the printing, prepress, and film industries. The video industry has started to notice the need for color management as well. This has led to several years of intense discussions on color management solutions. In response to these discussions, the International Color Consortium (ICC) created a standard which attempts to serve as a cross-platform device profile format to be used to characterize color devices. After a discussion of current practices in industry, this standard is described along with a discussion of the major limitations of color management today. Finally, examples of current color management workflows and ICC color management workflows are provided.