About color management

Color management allows you to get consistent color between digital cameras, scanners, monitors, and printers. Color management also helps different applications, monitors, and operating systems display colors consistently.

When you create computer graphics, each piece of equipment you work with that reproduces color--such as a scanner, color monitor, and desktop printer--is called a device. Each type of device reproduces a different range of color, called a color gamut. As you move an image from one device to another, its colors can shift in appearance, sometimes resulting in dramatic changes. Color management maps colors from a device, such as a monitor, to another device, such as a printer. Color mapping ensures that colors on the monitor represent colors that the printer can reproduce.

By attaching, or tagging, a color profile to an image, you define how colors appear in the image; changing the attached profile changes how colors appear. Images without attached profiles are known as untagged images and are not color managed.

When an image has a color profile assigned to it, each device recognizes the profile, and displays colors according to the settings in the profile. This way, colors should look the same with all the devices.