Since the advent of personal printing systems, color management has been a complex and time-consuming task. Color fidelity becomes especially important in such settings as mail-order catalogs, food advertisements, and fabric displays. In addition to having fidelity in colors, it is also desirable to utilize the widest spectrum possible. The difficulty of achieving these goals is apparent when one considers the enormous combinations of monitors, printers, scanners, and software packages that can be used.
There are various options for managing colors. The simplest but most time-consuming is to alter the colors in a design until they look "good" in the final printout. The most precise method is to calibrate the monitor and printer and use these measurements to create a "profile" which is then used by a color management software to translate colors between the monitor and the printer. The calibration is done by using a chromameter to measure the colorspace of the monitor and then printing out a known color chart and measuring values with a spectroradiometer. Companies such as Colorsavvy provide instrumentation to work with Apple’s Colorsync program or the equivalent Windows version. The International Color Consortium (ICC) has developed standards for profiles and many companies which deal with color management (Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Xerox, etc.) embed these profiles into files when saved in their applications. These profiles are very complex and elaborate.
The casual consumer however does not usually have access to such equipment and must make do with commonly available color management routines. Design software packages such as Adobe Illustrator attempt to patch together a color managing scheme through software. They take a reference input file, run it through an engine and match it to an output file. The reference files are profiles Adobe has compiled of typical printers and monitors. The idea is for the user to pick the profile that best fits the equipment they are using. It is this approach which have analyzed for our project and present below. For this project we characterized the basic color managing system in Adobe Illustrator. We present the results from our experiments and conclusions drawn in the following sections.