Glossary - Color Management for Photographers - page 441

Primary colors: The basic color building blocks used to create other colors.
Common primary colors such as red, green, and blue are additive pri-
maries (using light), and their opposite colors cyan, magenta, and yellow
are known as subtractive primaries. Additive primaries are the three
colors for both transmissive and emissive (light emitting) devices. Adding
certain proportions of each red, green, and blue can simulate a multitude
of color until a maximum is reached producing white. Note that not all
color systems necessarily use red, green, and blue as primary colors.
Green is not a primary color when creating colors using paint but instead
yellow, red, and blue.
Profile: See ICC profile .
Raster data: A mosaic of pixel data.
Relative colorimetric intent: See Rendering intent .
Rendering intent: The ICC specifies three rendering intents for mapping
colors from the PCS to the gamut of the destination: perceptual, satura-
tion, and colorimetric. Two basic techniques are utilized: gamut com-
pression, where all colors are compressed and affected, and gamut
clipping, where only out-of-gamut colors are affected. Perceptual and
saturation rendering intents use gamut compression and colorimetric
rendering intents use gamut clipping. See also PCS .
RIP (Raster Image Processor): Usually some software product that accepts
vector or PostScript data, takes this mathematical representation of a
shape or element, and creates a series of dots necessary to output the
shape. A RIP takes rasterizes data producing bitmap data necessary for
output.
Saturation: The purity of a color, independent of its hue and brightness
and a lack of gray pollution. The more gray a color contains, the lower
its saturation is. Colors of the highest saturation have no contamination
from other hues. What we like to call laser colors, any single wavelength
light source is totally saturated. See also Chroma .
Saturation intent: See Rendering intent .
Separation: Also known as a color separation. The process in which a
color image is broken down into color channels and additionally color
plates or similar color components for output. A CMYK color separation
is the process of taking a color image and breaking into cyan, magenta,
yellow, and black channels and depending on the output, possibly four
pieces of film for printing on a press.
Sheetfed (press): A sheetfed press uses sheets of paper to output large
print runs. See Web press .
Smart monitor: A display system that communicates with the host com-
puter system (usually via a USB cable) and adjusts the physical
properties of the display electronically for the user.