The term Color Management describes a controlled conversion of a color value from the color space of one device to another, while retaining it's visual appearance. Color Management can help transition colors between e.g. scanners, digital cameras, monitors, printers, and corresponding media.

The primary goal of Color Management is to obtain a good color match across different color devices. A frequent application of this would be to take an image and ensuring that it looks the same when printed across a range of different printer and media. Color Management can help us achieve the closest possible match for a color's appearance on every device.

In order to be able to transition colors between the color spaces of different devices, we need to know exactly what the achievable color spaces on each device look like. To describe the behavior of the various combinations of printer, ink, and media they must be compared (calibrated) in relation to a standard color space. To get values for comparision, pre-defined samples are printed and measured, creating an idealized color description of the device. This description is called a profile. Profiles are usually created for a certain purpose: either to describe the image color space (input) or to describe the printer color space (output).

What Color Management can achieve for the printout depends on the printer, ink, and media, as well as the data format and color space of the image that is printed. The following documentations explain the supported data formats, color spaces, and the methods for matching the input and the output color spaces in Ergosoft RIP products.