Colour Management: ICC Profiles

Colour consistency is achieved by utilising a global industry standard known as ICC Colour Management. ICC stands for ‘International Colour Consortium’ – the organisation which first introduced the system.

If you properly calibrate and profile your devices using a colorimeter or spectrophotometer, an ICC profile will be produced. An ICC profile describes to your photo processing software’s colour engine how a particular device behaves. This software can then interpret that information to display or print it accurately.

ICC profiles describe the colour of the pixels within digital photographic files in order to determine exactly how an image will look on our screens.

From an ICC Profile, we can find out:

• The darkest tones and colours the file can hold
• The lightest tones and colours the file can hold
• The colour gamut of the file
• The distribution and relationship between each of those tones and colours

At DPSB, we can create custom printer ICC profiles. We simply supply you with a special file to print containing colour squares and a full set of instructions for you to output the patches. All you then need to do is post the print outs to us and we will create the printer profiles.

Accurate printer profiles of your own printer, ink and paper combination are essential for good monitor to print matching and will also usually result in better prints than downloadable profiles from paper manufacturers whose printer profiles may not match your own individual printer’s characteristics or driver settings. You will need a profile for each type of paper that you use as well as each different printer.

Printer profiles can be easily applied when printing using software from Adobe and many others. They can also be used in many applications for soft-proofing (simulating on screen what will print). We can offer assistance if you need help using the profiles. Most customers are very pleasantly surprised by how much the depth and quality of colour on their prints improves when they receive their profiles, as well as the better matches they get to their calibrated and profiled monitor.

For more advice, you can get in touch with us here.