Color management

It helps to maintain color consistency throughout the entire workflow, from capturing an image to displaying or printing it.

Parts of color management are implemented in the operating system (OS), helper libraries, the application, and devices.

The film and broadcasting industries make use of some of the same concepts, but they frequently rely on more limited boutique solutions.

The film industry, for instance, often uses 3D LUTs (lookup table) to represent a complete color transformation for a specific RGB encoding.

At the consumer level, system wide color management is available in most of Apple's products (macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS).

[5] To describe the behavior of various output devices, they must be compared (measured) in relation to a standard color space.

Often a step called linearization is performed first, to undo the effect of gamma correction that was done to get the most out of limited 8-bit color paths.

The transformation of the scattered measurement data into a more regular form, usable by the application, is called profiling.

Profiling is a complex process involving mathematics, intense computation, judgment, testing, and iteration.

The ICC standard permits the exchange of output device characteristics and color spaces in the form of metadata.

This calculation is required whenever data is exchanged inside a color-managed chain and carried out by a Color Matching Module.

[9] In nearly every translation process, we have to deal with the fact that the color gamut of different devices vary in range which makes an accurate reproduction impossible.

Some colors must be shifted to the inside of the gamut, as they otherwise cannot be represented on the output device and would simply be clipped.

Conversely, an inkjet printer's "cyan" primary, a saturated mid-brightness blue, is outside the gamut of a typical computer monitor.

The color management system can utilize various methods to achieve desired results and give experienced users control of the gamut mapping behavior.

If an entire image is in-gamut, relative is perfect, but when there are out of gamut colors, which is preferable depends on a case-by-case basis.

Apple's classic Mac OS and macOS operating systems have provided OS-level color management APIs since 1993, through ColorSync.

[19] To fix this issue, Microsoft includes a new feature called "Auto Color Management" since Windows 11 2022.

It is also available as a separate Color Management Module - Adobe CMM for use by non-Adobe applications that supports 3rd-party CMMs.

[34] However, it is important to note that most browsers only do color management for images and CSS elements, but not video.

Regarding mobile browsers, Safari 13.1 (on iOS 13.4.1) recognizes the device color profile and can displays images accordingly.