Theoretically copies printed with different printing presses or even different print technologies can achieve a high similarity if colour control is optimised and adapted. 

Correct colour communication from the creation of the original to the printed product is vital. Since colour is an essential part of the print quality the demand on colour rendering, colour consistency and colour matching is crucial. 

The digitalisation of the workflow in media production caused a demand of an effective colour control. The development of different colour management systems became the solution. A control, based on mathematical equations, through the different conversion steps became central. The development of such colour management systems very soon created the need of a standard to be able to communicate colour profile data since the first developed systems were all vendor specific. 

 

The International Colour Consortium (ICC), established in 1993 by several of the leading companies in the prepress colour industry, created, promoted and encouraged the standardisation of an open, vendor-neutral, cross-platform colour management system architecture.

 

The standard defines a format (ICC, 1996) for characterisation of devices may it be scanners, monitors or out-put devices. This characterisation is gathered in the device profile which provides the colour management system with the information necessary to convert colour data between native device colour spaces and so called device independent colour spaces.

 

The CMM, Colour Management Module is the colour space transformation model and is the engine performing the conversion of image data from one colour space to the other. PCS, Profile Connection Space, is the device-independent colour space used for the transformations and CIELAB is one of the spaces recommended by ICC. Four rendering intents are recommended for the standard.

Working with ICC profiles enables the achievement of a correct colour flow in the printing process.