ColorSync is Apple's color management API for the Mac OS and Mac OS X. Image File history File links ColorSync_Logo. ... It has been suggested that Color Matching Method be merged into this article or section. ... API may refer to: In computing, application programming interface In petroleum industry, American Petroleum Institute In education, Academic Performance Index This page concerning a three-letter acronym or abbreviation is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... Mac OS, which stands for Macintosh Operating System, is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Computer for their Macintosh line of computer systems. ... Mac OS X (IPA pronunciation: ) is a line of proprietary, graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Computer, the latest of which is pre-loaded on all currently shipping Macintosh computers. ...

Version History

Apple developed the original 1.0 version of ColorSync as a Mac-only architecture. Later, Apple co-founded the International Color Consortium to develop a cross-platform profile format which became part of ColorSync 2.0. Apple, with the help of Adobe had ported ColorSync 2.0 and its SDK to Microsoft Windows. With ColorSync 3.0, the Windows version which was initially planned was discontinued. ColorSync 4.0 is the latest version, introduced in Mac OS X 10.1. The International Color Consortium was formed in 1993 by eight industry vendors in order to create a universal color management system that would function transparently across all operating systems and software packages. ... It has been suggested that Mudbrick be merged into this article or section. ... A Software Development Kit, or SDK for short, is typically a set of development tools that allows a software engineer to create applications for a certain software package, software framework, hardware platform, computer system, operating system or similar. ... Microsoft Windows is a family of operating systems by Microsoft. ... Mac OS X (IPA pronunciation: ) is a line of proprietary, graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Computer, the latest of which is pre-loaded on all currently shipping Macintosh computers. ... Mac OS X 10. ...

Overview

Human color perception is an incredibly complex and subtle process, and different devices have widely different color gamuts or ranges of color they can handle. To deal with these issues, ColorSync provides several different methods of doing color matching. For instance, perceptual matching tries to preserve as closely as possible the relative relationships between colors, even if all the colors must be systematically distorted in order to get them to fit within the gamut of the destination device. Because the human eye is more sensitive to color differences rather than absolute colors, this method tends to produce the best-looking results, subjectively speaking, for many common uses, but there are other methods that work better in some cases. In computer graphics, the gamut, or color gamut (pronounced ), is a certain complete subset of colors. ...

Profiles and color spaces

In ColorSync, the reference for defining colors is CIE XYZ space. All image input and output devices (scanners, printers, displays) have to be calibrated by providing a profile which define how their color information is to be interpreted relative to XYZ color space. This profile might be provided by the device manufacturer, but for better-quality results, it might be generated by performing actual measurements on the device with a colorimeter. The International Commission on Illumination (usually known as the CIE for its French-language name Commission Internationale de lEclairage) is the international authority on light, illumination, colour, and colour spaces. ... Please wikify (format) this article or section as suggested in the Guide to layout and the Manual of Style. ...

Thus, when an image is scanned on a scanner, the image file will include a copy of the scanner's profile to characterize the meaning of its color information. Then when the image is sent to an output device, a matching process converts the color information at the time of rendering from the source profile (that attached to the image) to the destination profile (that attached to the output device) so that the resulting colors print or display as closely as possible to the original image.

External links

• Apple's page on ColorSync