Real World Color Management, Second Edition

11. Color Management in the Operating System: Who Does What to Whom, When?

Apple and Microsoft tend to paint an overly rosy picture of color management as a panacea that will make whatever comes out of your desktop printer match your monitor, automatically. Anyone who has ever printed from a desktop computer, or has a passing knowledge of the laws of physics, knows otherwise. The truth is that OS-level color management does less than the marketing hype, but it also does much more than the marketing hype.

It does less in that OS-level color management can’t change the gamut of your printer to match that of your monitor—it can come reasonably close, but there’s simply no way you’ll get that R0, G0, B255 blue out of your printer (or, for that matter, ...