Next Generation Color Management Process Modeling for Digital Printing

With the technological change in digital color data processing, the color management based on ICC (international color consortium) profiles becomes a new strategy in the printing industry. However, this change is driving to reengineer the color reproduction workflows and how to help printing companies in improving their printing processes by means of color management has not been clearly spelled out by ICC yet. This is the main challenge for ICC to uphold color management for the printing industry in the next generation. This paper aims to address such a problem encountered in printing industry. It provides process modeling for a variety of color work flows, identifies the primitive activities in a unified process model for next generation color management to improve the color print quality and efficiency. It also discusses the key issues for the implementation of the color management processes, especially based on CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) output profiles, in terms of accuracy and efficiency.