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ICC Reports Advances in System Interoperability

RESTON, VA, USA—The International Color Consortium (ICC) reports progress on several initiatives to improve prepress and display systems' interoperability following its recent meeting in Scottsdale, AZ, USA. ICC's press release states:

The ICC Steering Committee has approved a change to the profile specification that designates a "recommended" chromatic adaptation transform or CAT. This recommendation was necessary because although there are technical reasons for using specific CAT of the several currently available, users frequently make this selection on the basis of convenience or simple chance. ICC's recommended CAT should be used in all cases when there is no explicit reason to use another.

It does not function as a "default,"however, so a chromatic adaptation tag is still required. "This transform is most commonly used when generating profiles for displays, particularly when one of the displays used is very different in chromaticity to the D50,"note[s] ICC technical secretary Tony Johnson.

Other changes to the profile specification adopted by the ICC clarify the rendering intent usage for the preview tag, which is used in soft proofing when one device is used to simulate another.

The Graphic Arts Special Interest Group and the Workflow Group also reported to ICC they've defined the most important challenges to implementation of color management in graphic arts workflows. The groups' listing will serve as a prioritized guide to further changes needed in the ICC specification.

The Architecture Group reported progress on a detailed specification of a baseline color-management module, which also is important in achieving interoperability.

ICC also noted five new members joined the consortium since its spring meeting, bringing the total voting membership to 69.

ICC was etablished in 1993 by eight industry vendors for the purpose of creating, promoting, and encouraging the standardization and evolution of an open, vendor-neutral, cross-platform color-managment system architecture and components. The outcome of this cooperation, says ICC, resulted in the development of the ICC profile specification, now in use by leading vendors of color-managment solutions.

Visit ICC at color.org.



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