What is a color profile?

Color profiles tell how a device produces color and what the actual colors are. How you see the colors on your monitor differs from how your printer or scanner sees colors. Each device has their own profile.

Device profiles are installed when a device is added to your system. These profiles vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. There are also third-party software and hardware profiles and you can also create your own custom profiles.

Here are some samples of color profiles available in Photoshop CS4.

Adobe RGB (1998)	Apple RGB	ColorMatch RGB	ProPhoto RGB	sRGB IE6196-21

Each of these were created the same. The color is RGB 88, 249, 17. As you can see from the samples, each color profile displays differently.

Sometimes you can view these with your Windows explorer and they all look the same, but when you post them to the internet they look different. This is because each internet program and monitor interprets colors differently.

As you can see, it is important to know what language each component speaks. Unfortunately, your camera, scanner, monitor, and printer all talk different color languages. None of them map the same actual color to the same R/G/B value. To solve this problem, the International Color Consortium has created standard — ICC profiles — for how devices can communicate color information.

Printer profiles let your image processing program, such as Photoshop, know how to translate what you see on the screen to the printed page as accurately as your printer allows.

Editing profiles, such as Adobe RGB or sRGB, allow you to edit images and get consistent results.

Monitor profiles tell your operating system what kind of monitor you are using, how many colors it can see, and how to interpret those colors to display them correctly.

A camera or scanner profile lets all the other devices interpret the original image.

My Story

I was using the ProPhoto RGB profile. I loved the way my photos would print on my printer with this profile.

I decided to email a couple of these photos to a print lab to have them printed. Later that day, the lab called and said there was something wrong with my photos. They all seem to have some sort of color cast to them. I made a quick trip over to the lab to look at the photos. They were awful. After talking about how I processed them, we discovered that it was the profile I used. Their equipment could only recognize the RGB profile.

I went back to work and converted the profiles to RGB and re-sent them to the lab. The photos came out perfectly.

The reason for this story.... Make sure your lab can process the profile you use. All labs may not be as nice and try to sell you the awful prints. After all, it would be your mistake.

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