ColorSync: Consistent and predictable colour from capture to edit to print.
The blue of a sky, the green of a meadow, the skin tone of a human face — nothing can make or break a great picture like the accuracy of its colours.
Which is a prime reason why so many pro photographers are devoted to Mac OS X Tiger. Mac OS X Tiger is the only operating system that fully supports the ICC version 4 standard for managing colour — delivering the industry’s most advanced OS-level colour management system.
From Input to Edit to Output
Mac OS X Tiger takes a system-wide and always-on approach to colour by integrating ColorSync, based on the International Color Consortium (ICC) standard for colour management, into every phase of the workflow: capture, edit, and output. This ensures that colour accurately translates from one device to another across your entire workflow.
You can even apply custom colour profiles each time you connect your camera to your Mac. Colour profiles are employed by applications throughout the workflow - Aperture, iPhoto, Adobe Photoshop, and other professional tools. All using the same standard as developed by the ICC.
Full Device Support
Indeed, from the time you plug any imaging device into a Mac — a camera, a scanner, a display, a printer — ColorSync knows its colour profile instantly and helps manage communication among applications and devices to guarantee dead-accurate colour — over time, across media, even across multiple systems used by your colleagues and clients.
If you’re comfortable with tweaking colour management technology, ColorSync also offers you tools to create your own custom profiles. For example, you can calibrate your displays with those of a regular client, enabling “soft proofing” of colour on screen, instead of on paper. The benefits — reduced cost, greater efficiency, faster turnaround, and smiling clients — are numerous.
True Hues
However you take advantage of ColorSync, you always enjoy a predictable colour-managed workflow, consistent with your specific needs and techniques — whether your images are destined for a magazine or a brochure, newsprint or archival paper, a gallery wall or a digital display.
With ColorSync built into Mac OS X Tiger, there are no surprises. And no disappointments. Which is yet another reason why no other platform is better suited for photographers.
“The exact colour I see on my monitor, [my colleague] sees on her monitor, our contributing editor in Scotland sees on her monitor, and our pre-press guys see on their monitor in Los Angeles. At a digital photographer’s studio last week, I was looking at the images we just shot on the photographer’s Cinema Display. What I saw in the studio is what I see in my office. Colour is now spot on. We have dot-to-dot fidelity, from computer to press.”
— Kathryn Hansen, Dwell Magazine
Across-the-Board Accuracy
Because ColorSync ensures that built-in, up-to-date colour management specs are integrated into Tiger, it’s easy for software developers to build colour management features into their applications. So when everything from Mail to Safari to any useful little shareware program can access the same colour management tools, everything on your Mac works together much more reliably.
ICC Color Management
The ICC was established to create a colour management solution that would deliver consistent colour between applications, across computing platforms, and across imaging devices. Founded in 1993 by Apple and seven other vendors, the ICC now has a member base of more than 70 industry-leading manufacturers and software developers, including Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Creo, Adobe and Quark. Its charter is to create and promote an open colour management architecture and vendor-neutral file formats.
Tip
You can compare the colour gamut of two profiles using the ColorSync Utility — for example, the gamut of your desktop printer compared with the gamut of a commercial printer. To do so, click the first profile you wish to compare, then click the triangle next to the Lab Plot label and choose “Hold for comparison” from the pop-up menu. Next, from the list on the left, select any other ICC profile that you wish to compare with the first profile. Both will be locked together; however, you can rotate the gamut view once you place the cursor in the gamut window area. To zoom in on the gamut, hold down the Option key and drag.
