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Color Management

ColorSync is the color management system for Mac OS X. It provides essential services for fast, consistent, and accurate color calibration, proofing, and reproduction as well as an interface for accessing and managing systemwide color management settings. It also supports color calibration with hardware devices such as printers, scanners, and displays.

Beginning with Mac OS X version 10.3, the system provides improved support for ColorSync. In most cases, you do not need to call ColorSync functions at all. Quartz and Cocoa automatically use ColorSync to manage pixel data when drawing on the screen. They also respect ICC (International Color Consortium) profiles and apply the system’s monitor profile as the source color space. However, you might need to use ColorSync directly if you define a custom color management module (CMM), which is a component that implements color-matching, color-conversion, and gamut-checking services.

For information about the ColorSync API, see ColorSync Manager Reference.

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