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Managing Color With ColorSync


Color: A Brief Overview

Color is a sensation and, therefore, a subjective experience. The sensation of color is one component of the visual sensation, caused by the sensitivity of the human eye to light. Light can be perceived either directly from light sources (such as the sun, a fire, incandescent or fluorescent bulbs, television screens, and computer displays) or indirectly, when light from these sources is transmitted through or reflected by objects. Color sensation is also affected by how the brain processes information and is specific to each individual. Thus color perception is a very complex phenomenon.

The foundation of the color reproduction process is trichromatic color vision , which describes the capacity of the human eye to respond equally to two or more sets of stimuli having different visible spectra. This means that two or more visible spectra may exist that will be perceived as the same color, a phenomenon known as metamerism . Because of this property, spectral color reproduction, a very expensive and impractical process, can be replaced by trichromatic color reproduction, a process that is much cheaper and easier to control.

Trichromatic color reproduction induces the illusion of a color using various amounts of only three primary colors: either red, green, and blue mixed additively or cyan, magenta, and yellow mixed subtractively. Additive and subtractive colors are described in Additive and Subtractive Color . Trichromatic color reproduction is the fundamental mechanism used in the majority of color reproduction devices, from television, computer display and movie screens, to magazines, newspapers, large posters, and small pages printed on your desktop printer.

Computers enable us to control color digitally and many peripherals have been developed for acquiring, displaying, and reproducing color. As a result, there is a need for a mechanism to maintain color control in an environment that can include different computer operating systems and hardware, as well as a wide variety of devices and media connected to the computer.

In the Mac OS, the ColorSync Manager is the part of the operating system that provides color management. For a detailed description, see ColorSync Manager Overview .


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