Real World Color Management, Second Edition

8. Building Output Profiles: Final Destinations

Output profiles do more than just deliver your known, calibrated color to your output device. They’re also the map you use when you’re deciding where you want to drive that color. Output profiles not only help the color management system (CMS) produce the right numbers to represent your color on the output device, but they also help the CMS show you, on your display or on another printer, how the output device will render the color before you print it. Most of our captured images contain colors that our output devices can’t reproduce, so we have to decide how we want to handle these out-of-gamut colors: the output profile is the map that shows you the possible destinations. If that map doesn’t describe ...