Color management on Linux
In Living Color
Get a grasp of color management basics and put your knowledge to practical use.
The purpose of color management is to produce consistent color output across different devices. This definition might sound simple enough, but understanding the mechanics of color management and implementing a color-managed workflow can be a rather complex and confusing affair at times. This article can help you to get an understanding of color management fundamentals and set up a color-managed environment using open source Linux tools.
Color Management Distilled
The need for color management arises from the fundamental problem of color reproduction: a formal representation of a given color (e.g., numeric value of the color in a specific color model) doesn't necessarily produce the same color on different devices for a wide variety of factors. Thus, the primary goal of color management is to achieve a consistent color reproduction across devices. So, for example, a photo taken by a color-managed camera should look the same on a color-managed computer screen.
In a color-managed workflow, each device (e.g., a digital camera and LCD display) has its own color profile that characterizes the color response of that particular device. Each color profile describes these colors relative to a standardized set of reference colors. Color-managed software then uses these standardized profiles to translate color from one device to another. This is usually performed by a color management module [1].
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