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.

Each device has its own individual color space and range of colors that it can display or print. The color space specifies how color information is represented in an image when it is displayed on a particular device. As the image is passed from one device to the next, the color information about the image is converted from the color space of the source device to the color space of the destination device. Because color spaces do not exactly match between devices, some of the color information can be lost or modified in the conversion process.

A color space is a representation of the individual colors that can be combined to create other colors. Some color spaces that are relevant to printing are:

  • RGB

    In an RGB color space, red, green, and blue light are combined in different amounts and intensities to create different colors. RGB colors are often specified as single-byte integers numbered from 0 through 255. You can specify 256 levels of intensity for each of the three colors. For example:

    • R=0, G=0, B=0 yields black
    • R=255, G=255, B=255 yields white