What on earth is color (SIC) management about?

[xoggoth]

Another brilliant explanation! Cheers Nick.

Can't say I ever noticed any significant differences in monitor colours. I do use two monitors, smallest is bit dingier but assumed that was just age.

[NickFitz]

The point is that monitors aren't reliable: when the files were created on the other machine, they were probably the wrong colours, but the maladjustment of the monitor made it look as if they were correct.

Although you really need a hardware device that analyses the actual light coming from the screen to get a monitor calibrated correctly, using the correct colour profile for the monitor is a major step in the right direction. In fact, if you were to go to the machine on which the artwork was originally created and supply an appropriate colour profile (and assuming the monitor settings aren't totally out of whack) you would probably see the colours as all wrong on there too.

The point of colour profiling is to try to ensure that colours look the same across all devices, right down to importing from scanners or exporting to printers, as well as looking at screens. If you want to see how different screens display different colours in different ways, go into somewhere like Currys and look at the serried ranks of widescreen HD televisions all displaying the same picture: you will see massive variations in colour. As they often seem to show sports on these things, comparing things like the colour of the grass and the players' shirts should make it clear that even screens from the same manufacturer can render the same colour in obviously different ways.

It can be disconcerting when one uses colour management for the first time: what you are adapted to may have been totally wrong, and you have to adjust, although such adjustment happens pretty rapidly.

Embedded profiles can be a good or bad thing, depending on circumstances.

An old friend of mine who knows vastly more than I do about these matters has written a brief summary of the issues surrounding colour in the context of displays and suchlike devices, and a more detailed introduction to colour management. He has further articles about the subject, which you will find links to at the foot of those articles I linked to above. (BTW, he doesn't sell any of the software or hardware to which he refers, and prides himself on the independence and occasionally brutal honesty of his reviews, to the chagrin of certain PR agencies.)

EDIT: if you have a dual monitor setup, and neither of them is colour-managed, try opening MS Paint or similar and creating a large image and filling it with, say, yellow. Then move the window such that it straddles both monitors, and you should see an obvious difference - or at least a subtle difference even if they are of the same make, model and age.

Then apply the correct colour profile to each monitor, and they should look very close to identical.

This won't work if things are already colour-managed, which is much more common with recent versions of Windows and recent systems.

FURTHER EDIT: Microsoft's resident wizard Raymond Chen (Whom God Preserve) had something to say about the subject last year

[xoggoth]

Got Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 which among other "improvements" over the old Jasc package has a thing called color management, that allows you to set various profiles.

I have tried every darn thing, checked profile is ok for my monitor as per their website, but when I open some files made on another machine I get a pop up saying it's been converted to the current color space and all the colours are wrong. I have to open them in MS Paint and cut and paste.

WTF is this about? Surely the whole point of any monitor is to render colours in a standard way so they look the same on any? Why would one want to adjust colours to specific monitors?

Edit: Some files open normally some don't. Nothing to do with type. Message on ones that don't mentions an embedded profile.