Color Printing Concepts

Color printing is significantly more complicated than black and white printing. If you understand some of the complexities, you can make the transition from black and white printing to grayscale or color printing more smoothly.

In this section:

  1. Color Spaces and ICC profiles
    Presentation devices, such as computer monitors and printers, create colors differently. Because of these differences, colors must be described differently for each device. The different methods of describing colors are called color spaces. In addition, each device might have one or more International Color Consortium (ICC) profiles associated with it. ICC profiles are used when an image or another object is converted to the color space of a different device.
  2. Gamut and Rendering Intent
    Every device has a gamut, a range of colors or shades of colors that it can display or print. Some devices have larger gamuts than others; some devices have gamuts that are similar sizes, but that contain slightly different colors. When an image or a print job is created on a device with a gamut that is different from the printer, you can use a rendering intent to tell the printer how to adjust the colors that are outside the gamut of the printer.
  3. Color Mixing and Calibration
    Four standard colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) are blended t