• An introduction to color management

• Color management systems (CMS)

• Installing color profiles

  • Monitor

  • Printer

  • Activating device profiles in Serif PagePlus

• Further advice

As discussed in the Introduction to Color and Color Models pages, the processes of designing with a computer and printing with ink use two quite different ways of describing and producing color, and the technologies result in a different range of colors being available to the screen and the printed page. We can minimize the differences between the two color models by considering a technology called color management that strives to make them less discordant, which can help through the entire design and print process.

Producing a desktop publication involves coordinating a chain of devices for the different processes involved, e.g. scanner and digital camera for importing images, monitor for display, and color printer, imagesetter, and printing press for the final output. Each of these devices uses different technologies and has a different color gamut with which it either detects or produces colors. Simply connecting the devices together without taking account of their different sensitivities may result in your printed output bearing little relation to your initial on-screen colors.

To integrate these devices effectively, we need to find some way of harmonizing their different color spaces and color gamuts. A color management system (CMS) is one key to ensuring that the colors in your printed result match your expectations as nearly as possible. Color management can be many things to many people.

• For personal printing, it might mean simply adjusting the color balance on your monitor, or printing out the publication and checking that the printed colors and designs are somewhere in the area of what you were expecting.
  
• At the extreme high end, a professional graphics studio might invest in installing special lighting and recalibrating all system hardware so that artists at multiple stations work under exactly the same technical and ambient conditions for ultimate consistency.
  
• An affordable approach for professional printing is to use PagePlus desktop publishing software, which provides built-in support for industry-standard color profiles for your devices and access to both RGB and CMYK colors. See below for a description of color profiles and how they help make designing and printing in color less of a mismatched situation.

Note that even with a color management system, it’s impossible to make inks suddenly start printing as vibrantly as regular on-screen colors! Instead, the CMS restricts the color range (gamut) of your on-screen display to match the color gamut of print devices. This means that your screen will display colors as they will print, removing uncertainty from the process.

Modern versions of Microsoft Windows use a built-in color management system that relies on an industry-standard color format developed by the International Color Consortium (ICC). Serif PagePlus can take advantage of this by saving color files with ICC descriptions, called color profiles, of the applicable output devices. Likewise, PagePlus can read in ICC profiles when it opens a color file. A color profile is a mathematical way of converting to a device-independent color space (in this case, the CIE Lab space, which has a very wide gamut), so that it can be translated correctly to a particular device.

As we mentioned earlier, different color systems (RGB, CMYK) have different gamuts, and each device introduces its own calibration errors. For the designer, the benefit of color profiling is to ultimately provide a subset of colors suitable for both design and print. The colors displayed on the monitor will be degraded by the printer profile to only those colors that the printer can reproduce, otherwise any kind of “match” is not possible.

In order to implement this system correctly, you’ll need to provide an ICC profile (files named with a .icm or .icc extension) for each of your devices. You may have obtained such files with the original equipment, or can easily download them from the World Wide Web (e.g. http://www.color.org). Profiles may also be constructed using advanced equipment calibration processes (refer to the equipment manufacturer).

Reminder: When you have enabled profiling for all your system components, the colors on your monitor will appear to degrade. This is because the display now shows only those colors that can be printed (the printer color gamut) so as to achieve a color match through the design process. You can return to the dialog and switch color management off to restore “normal” screen colors.

If tweaking your computer to make your screen colors more closely match printed colors seems like a lot of unnecessary effort, there is an alternative route you can consider while still being able to predict what your printed colors will look like. If you obtain a sample of your chosen print service's CMYK color output as a color chart, you can use CMYK colors from that chart when you are designing, knowing in advance what they will look like when printed. This is know as color matching and is covered in the next topic.