| The Idea Guide to Colour Management |
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Page 1 of 8 What is Colour Management?Managing colour is something that we all do when we create and print images. When you assess a scan on your monitor and make adjustments so that you get a good print from your inkjet printer you are using colour management. Your own experience may tell you that your inkjet printer tends to produce slightly cool results compared to what you see on screen. To get an acceptable proof you need to make a small adjustment to the colour balance to warm the image prior to printing. Some people see this process as a failure of their equipment – it isn’t. The problems arise from a shortcoming in mathematics and colour descriptions! All colour devices have their own character; they excel in some colours and don’t do so well with others. You've probably heard the term *gamut* being used as a description of the number of colours that a printer is capable of reproducing. When a manufacturer creates new inks and/or papers they measure the colour gamut and then assign numerical values to the colours. The purest red, green and blue values are all set to the maximum allowed in RGB colour space – 255. Sometime later a new dye is discovered that produces a much more vivid red and the manufacturer launches a new range of inks. Once again the colour gamut is measured. The red is incredibly rich and vibrant, so what colour value do they assign it? 255 of course - as they haven’t got any other option! So if you send the same RGB value to printers using old and new inks you get different colours! The RGB colour model is called *device dependent* because the colour reproduced is totally dependent on the device. This concept is really important to understand so I’ll list the device dependent colour spaces that you are likely to meet: RGB And to reiterate that if you are given an image in any of these colour spaces they *will* reproduce *differently* on any device that you choose to print or proof on. So how do you ensure that you get the correct (or best matching) colours from different devices? Next we'll discuss ICC Profiles. |
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