Color Management

Images, graphics, and photographs often appear different depending on the monitor or the printer you use. The colors printed by one printer might not match the colors printed on another printer, even if they came from the same source. If it is important that colors stay consistent from camera, scanner, or monitor to printer, you must use color management practices.

It is virtually impossible to accurately reproduce the colors that you see on your monitor on a printed page. Because printers typically have smaller color gamuts than other devices, some of the colors must always be adjusted when images are transformed for printing. With color management, you can control the adjustments so they are less noticeable than they might be if you use the default settings of your image creation software, print server, and printer.

Several factors play significant roles in color management, including ICC profiles, rendering intents, and paper characteristics.

In this section:

  1. ICC Profiles
    The International Color Consortium (ICC) is an organization that has established open standards for color management. These standards help products work together by identifying a device-independent color space and defining the elements of an ICC profile.
  2. Rendering Intents
    Rendering intents indicate what you want a printer to do with colors that are outside its gamut.
  3. Paper Characteristics
    The paper that you use has a significant impact on the colors that you see. Even if you use the same ICC profile and the same printer, printing on a different paper can result in a very different color appearance.
Parent topic: Color and Grayscale Printing