international color consortium (ICC)

The International Color Consortium(ICC), an organization founded in 1993, is the scientific institution when it comes to light, color spaces and lighting. The institution was founded by Apple and seven other companies. The common goal was color management that would ensure consistent color reproduction between computers and peripheral devices.

Today, the ICC has more than 70 members, including manufacturers and software developers such as Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Creo, Adobe and Quark.

The ICC drives the standardization of open, vendor-neutral color management systems, and their color models and algorithms are used in Windows and Mac OS. The activities of the International Color Consortium have led to the development of the ICC color profiles, among other things. In 2005, the ICC Specification 4.0 was developed and adopted as ISO 15076-1:2005 with worldwide validity. For the future, the ICC is also working on an open architecture for color management and vendor-independent file formats.