Abbreviation ICC Type Consortium | Formation 1993 Headquarters Reston, United States | |
Motto Making color seamless between devices and documents Purpose Promote the use and adoption of open, vendor-neutral, cross-platform color management systems. | ||
The International Color Consortium was formed in 1993 by eight vendors in order to create an open, vendor-neutral color management system which would function transparently across all operating systems and software packages.
The ICC specification, currently on version 4.3, allows for matching of color when moved between applications and operating systems, from the point of creation to the final output, whether display or print. This specification is technically identical to ISO 15076-1:2010, available from ISO.
The ICC profile which describe the color attributes of a particular device or viewing requirement by defining a mapping between the source or target color space and a profile connection space (PCS).
The ICC defines the format precisely but does not define algorithms or processing details. This means there is room for variation between different applications and systems that work with ICC profiles.
ICC has also published a preliminary specification for iccMAX, a next-generation color management architecture with significantly expanded functionality and a choice of colorimetric, spectral or material connection space. Details are at http://www.color.org/iccmax/
Membership
The eight founding members of the ICC were Adobe, Agfa, Apple, Kodak, Microsoft, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, and Taligent.
Since then Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, and Taligent have left the organization, and many other firms have become ICC members, including, as of January 2011, Canon, Fuji, Fujitsu, Heidelberg Printing Machines AG, Hewlett–Packard, Konica Minolta, Kyocera, Lexmark, NEC, Nikon, Nokia, OKI Data, Sun Chemical, Heidelberger Druckmaschinen, and X-Rite.
At the beginning of 2014, ICC membership has grown to a total of 61 members, including their founding, regular, and honorary members. Aside from members of the photography, printing, and painting industry, new members from several different industries include MathWorks, Nokia, Sony Corporation, and Signazon.com.