Xerox CX manual Color tools overview, Managing color and profiles

7 Managing color

Color tools overview

The CX print server provides you with a number of tools and options that enable you to adjust and improve the color quality in your jobs.

The following tools are available:

●Profile Manager

●Spot Color Editor

●Gradation Tool

●Calibration table manager

●Media and Color Manager

Managing color and profiles

A profile is a file that describes how a particular device reproduces color. It represents the colorimetric behavior of a given device for known media and imaging parameters (such as substrate/paper stock, resolution, and inks). Profiles are used to reproduce color from one device’s color space to another device's color space in a consistent manner. They provide the necessary information to convert color data between device-dependent color spaces and device-independent color spaces. You use profiles to color manage your system.

Color management is a series of steps taken to ensure that colors are accurate and repeatable when transferred from one device to another. Color management helps us reproduce the color conceived by a graphic artist or photographer as closely as possible on a monitor, a proof, or a press sheet. Color management enables accurate and repeatable color reproduction, within each device’s color capability, throughout the entire workflow.

Before you can print a color document, the color data in it must be converted to the gamut of the printer. Whether performed by the CX print server or a host-based CMS, the process of converting color data for a printer is the same: the CMS interprets RGB object data according to a specified source profile and adjusts both RGB and CMYK data according to a specified output profile, also called a destination profile by some color management systems.