Communicating and reproducing exact color has always been hard, but important enough for the graphic arts, photo, prepress and print industries to traditionally go to enormous lengths to make the color come out right. However, today's technologies and workflows make the traditional methods increasingly difficult to apply. Direct-to-plate printing and direct digital presses make traditional film-based proofing methods impossible. The growing use of digital cameras calls CMYK-based workflows into question. And while traditional methods of color management worked backwards from the final output, in today's fast-paced world we often need to work with color long before the final output process has been decided.

Color management systems seek to replace the old ad-hoc practices with an open, cross-platform standard method of communicating color information as accurately as possible, within the limitations of the devices used, throughout the reproduction process. A properly implemented color management system eliminates multiple iterations of proofing and rescanning, allows easy repurposing of color files for different types of output, and attaches an unambiguous color meaning to each piece of color information in your documents. It can save time and money, and open up new workflows that would have previously been impossible.