Identifying the relevance of colour profiles and the standards of colour

Written by Corinna Miller and Bethany Frost

Colour is a primary target in any form of advertisement. With 85 percent of consumers choosing what they buy and up to 90 percent of impulse decisions about products based solely on color, colour becomes vital in attracting the viewer. This is why it is essential in understanding the importance of Colour and its impact on consumers.

With any production of an ad, there are a number of operations — from the creative computer to the printing press — that have to be performed with the colours in the artwork. For example, through this process, an important thing to evaluate is how the colour values in the delivered ads are to be interpreted. This can be identified in Colour Management: the agreed-on set of rules for who does what and how colour values are to be interpreted. This is how, therefore, publications set an agreed ICC profile for ads that are submitted to them; making it approachable for the creative designer while keeping to the required standards of their print.

Precise, consistent Colour Management requires accurate ICC-compliant profiles (International Colour Consortium) of all of your colour devices. Most colour profiles are in the form of an ICC profile, which is a small file with a .ICC or .ICM file extension. For example, without an accurate profile, a perfectly scanned image may appear incorrect in another program. This misleading representation may cause you to make unnecessary, time-wasting, and potentially damaging “corrections” to an already satisfactory image. By embedding Colour profiles into images to specify the gamut range of the data, it can ensure that users see the same colours on different devices. Therefore, every device that is processing colour should have its own ICC profile and when this is achieved the system is said to have an end-to-end colour-managed workflow. With this kind of workflow you can be sure that colours are not being lost or modified.

When using ICC profiles in your workflow, they become an important building block for colour management, such describing output intents in the PDF/A, PDF/X and PDF/VT standards. Documents without assigned profiles are known as untagged and contain only raw colour numbers; this can also cause a common issue of output intents claimed as missing from the document. This is due to the Colour Profile functioning also as the Output Intent for the PDF of an ad. PDF/X output intent must include an ICC profile; therefore, it is required that if any colours are included are defined in device independent colour spaces (ICC-tagged or LAB). When working with untagged documents, however, Adobe applications use the current working space profile to display and edit colours. Essentially, it will automatically assign new documents a Colour Profile based on Working Space options in the Colour Settings dialog box; this is most commonly set to FORGA839.

To summarise the importance of colour and to ensure that your workflow when practicing Colour Profiles are at the best of their capabilities, here are some useful facts:

1. Colour profiles must be configured in the application creating the PDF/X documents. PDF/X allows only printer profiles as output intent (unlike PDF/A which also allows monitor profiles).
2. Monitor profiles describe how the monitor is currently reproducing colour. This is the first profile you should create because viewing colour accurately on your monitor allows for critical colour decisions in the design process. If what you see on your monitor is not representative of the actual colours in your document, you will not be able to maintain colour consistency.
3. Output device profiles Describe the colour space of output devices like desktop printers or a printing press. The colour management system uses output device profiles to properly map the colours in a document to the colours within the gamut of an output device’s colour space.
4. The output profile should also take into consideration specific printing conditions, such as the type of paper and ink. For example, glossy paper is capable of displaying a different range of colours than matte paper. Most printer drivers come with built‑in colour profiles.
5. When applying the ICC Profile to your ad, you must take into account that this profile is the final destination device you will use to reproduce colour in the PDF.

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