Windows 98 incorporates system-wide colour management software for imaging devices. The idea behind colour management is to make up for the various conflicting ways in which different hardware devices reproduce colour digitally. For example, a scanner sees reflected or filtered red-green-blue light in anything up to 36bit colour depth, while a monitor tries to produce its own red-green-blue primaries in up to 24bit depth. Worse, a printer must turn all this into process printing colours, which can be cyan-magenta-yellow, the same plus black, or indeed six-colour systems or spot colours for a wider gamut again.

The common factor behind all the devices is the digital representation of colour itself; all that is necessary is for the data to be modified appropriately as it is processed by each hardware device, making up for its unique shortcomings or peculiarities. These peculiarities can be saved as a type of digital colour database file which basically profiles the colour capabilities of the device. A colour management system, therefore, provides a way for colour data be processed by profiled hardware imaging devices without losing colour fidelity. In brief, it ensured that what you print will look like what you see on screen, which in turn looks just like the original image you scanned or photographed.

The system within Windows 98 is called Image Color Management 2.0, based on industry standard 'ICC' profiling. Many graphics applications already support this system, and naturally the rest of them will do very soon now that Microsoft has settled upon which standard to use. The system works automatically in the background: all you have to do is specify which profile to use with which device. Windows 98 comes with a small set of common monitor profiles, but those for your actual equipment must be obtained from the manufacturers. New products will include ICM 2.0 profiles along with the drivers, and many manufacturers are providing them for current products as free downloads from their Web sites.

With scanners and digital cameras, you can do this from within the Scanners and Cameras control panel. With monitors, you can choose a monitor profile from within the Display Properties control panel (view the Settings tab, click the Advanced... button and look in the Color Management tab in the Advanced Settings). You apply a profile to a printer by opening the Printers control panel, right-clicking the printer you want, choosing Properties and then clicking on the Color Management tab.

Once set up like this, your printer, monitor and image capture devices should produce more reliable results in colour. You can also customise these settings from within graphics application software which supports ICM 2.0. Usually, these programs provide a Color Management command somewhere under their File menus, allowing you to switch management on or off and alter which profiles to use for particular jobs. You will also be able to choose how digital colour is to be converted (or 'rendered') according to 'intent', so maximising the versatility of your imaging hardware.

Windows 98 provides four rendering intents:
* Perceptual matching - best for large numbers of colours and gradients, such as in photographic images
* Saturation matching - best for vivid presentation materials such as graphs and pie charts
* Relative Colorimetric matching - best for exact matching of fewer colours, such as logos
* Absolute Colorimetric matching - best for proofing images to be output on a device you don't have (for example, when preparing to send to a bureau)

The profiling system used by ICM 2.0 is compatible with ColorSync, the colour management software integrated into the Apple Macintosh operating system. In theory at least, this should ensure colour fidelity for professional designers using cross-platform equipment.