Color Management and Why We Need It - Color Management for Photographers - page 26

One of the first “tools” (and I use the term loosely) for attempting to
get a display and print to match each other was an Adobe Photoshop
utility called Knoll Gamma . The idea was to move various red, green, and
blue sliders to adjust the display's video signal in order to produce a match
between a reference image and a print. The idea of altering a display to
match a print had been suggested for years, and this process is both very
crude and quite ineffective when you need to print a file to more than
one device. Nonetheless, this is a form of color management if indeed a
poor method. To this day, people continue to recommend this kind of
solution. If a user is intending only to print to a single output device and
understands the severe limitations of using the crude sliders in adjusting
a display, this process is admittedly better than nothing. Knoll Gamma
has long been abandoned by Adobe and was replaced with a similar
product called Adobe Gamma . The original purpose of Adobe Gamma is
not to make the screen look like a print, but rather to put the display into
a known state.
In the very early days of color management on the desktop, propri-
etary products from various companies came onto the scene. A detailed
history lesson serves no purpose other than to point out that the propri-
etary nature of these early products sometimes caused as many problems
as they solved. Users would need to stick with one solution since the
various software and hardware products were both limited and could
work only within the confines of the one manufacturer's product line. In
the early 1990s, Apple Computer initiated a meeting with most of the
various proprietary companies, and together they formed what is known
as the ICC (International Color Consortium). This group of companies,
including Eastman Kodak, Agfa, HP, and others, agreed to create an open,
cross-platform color management solution. This would allow users to
work with any ICC-sanctioned product from any of the companies and
“mix and match” whatever solutions they wished. The ICC grew to
include many firms, and the color management organization is now well
established.
Open Color Management Systems
The basic idea of this new system was to create a standardized structure
for color management. Part of this structure was the standardization of
a file format for devices, which are also known as ICC profiles . These device
profiles describe the way devices within the imaging chain produce color.
We will discuss in detail the creation, editing, and use of ICC profiles. The
advantage of utilizing the ICC architecture is the ability to share color
information across operating systems. An ICC profile created with a
Kodak product running on a Macintosh could also be used on a
Windows-based computer in any software that was ICC savvy (also
known as ICC aware). Software manufacturers interested in utilizing ICC
color management could implement their products to work with these