ICC profile

An ICC profile is a standardised file describing the colour behaviour of a device — a monitor, printer, scanner, camera. Defined by the International Color Consortium (founded 1993 by Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and others) to make cross-device colour reproducible.

Without ICC profiles, the same RGB value (255, 100, 50) would look subtly different on every screen and print differently on every printer. With them, software can translate values between devices so the perceived colour stays consistent.

Common profile examples:

• sRGB IEC61966-2.1 — the standard web/consumer-monitor profile.
• Adobe RGB (1998) — wider gamut for prepress and photography.
• Display P3 — Apple’s modern wide-gamut display profile.
• US Web Coated SWOP v2 — the de facto standard CMYK profile for US commercial print.
• Camera-specific profiles embedded in RAW files describe how the sensor mapped real-world light to digital values.

Operating systems and image editors use ICC profiles silently. Where it becomes user-facing: when an image is tagged with one profile but viewed in software assuming another, colours shift. The most common gotcha is sRGB photos viewed on a wide-gamut monitor with no profile-aware software — saturated colours look oversaturated.