International Color Consortium.(group of scanner vendors)(Industry Trend or Event)

The International Color Consortium (ICC) is an international committee comprising most of the major suppliers to the industry-Adobe, Agfa, Apple, Heidelberg Prepress and many others. It was set up in 1993 to develop a standard means of managing color production workflows across disparate devices, including screens, digital cameras, scanners and output engines. Device independence was recognized as a necessary requirement for color images produced in open environments. Without the inherent control of a closed system, however, color rendering is subject to the different behaviors of different devices.

The organization wanted to design a production method whereby color integrity could be preserved in multiple-user environments. The idea was to standardize color handling in modular environments so that its production was as predictable using open platforms as it had been using proprietary systems.

The consortium's approach has been to develop a device-independent profile format that is available to the entire industry. The format defines the characteristics of a particular input or output device to enable subsequent processes to take into account the color behavior of the capture or output technology. Tags written in the ICC format are attached to data files so that when the files are opened any compensation for variables in the rendering devices is automatically applied.

The idea is to normalize the presentation of color so that it does not depend on the manner in which an input or output device captures or presents color. This objective has now been …