Operation Manual

Table Of Contents
325
USING ACROBAT X STANDARD
Color management
Last updated 10/11/2011
If you choose this option, it is very important that you disable color management in your printer driver. Letting the
application and the printer driver simultaneously manage colors during printing results in unpredictable color. Search
Help for additional instructions.
Obtaining custom profiles for desktop printers
If the output profiles that come with your printer don’t produce satisfactory results, you obtain custom profiles in the
following ways:
Purchase a profile for your type of printer and paper. This is usually the easiest and least expensive method.
Purchase a profile for your specific printer and paper. This method involves printing a profiling target on your
printer and paper, and providing that target to a company that will create a specific profile. This is more expensive
than purchasing a standard profile, but can provide better results because it compensates for any manufacturing
variations in printers.
Create your own profile using a scanner-based system. This method involves using profile-creation software and
your own flatbed scanner to scan the profiling target. It can provide excellent results for matte surface papers, but
not glossy papers. (Glossy papers tend to have fluorescent brighteners in them that look different to a scanner than
they do in room light.)
Create your own profile using a hardware profile-creation tool. This method is expensive but can provide the best
results. A good hardware tool can create an accurate profile even with glossy papers.
Tweak a profile created using one of the previous methods with profile-editing software. This software can be
complex to use, but it lets you correct problems with a profile or simply adjust a profile to produce results more to
your taste.
More Help topics
Install a color profile” on page 328
Working with color profiles
About color profiles
Precise, consistent color management requires accurate ICC-compliant profiles of all of your color devices. For
example, without an accurate scanner profile, a perfectly scanned image may appear incorrect in another program,
simply due to any difference between the scanner and the program displaying the image. This misleading
representation may cause you to make unnecessary, time-wasting, and potentially damaging “corrections” to an
already satisfactory image. With an accurate profile, a program importing the image can correct for any device
differences and display a scan’s actual colors.
A color management system uses the following kinds of profiles:
Monitor profiles Describe how the monitor is currently reproducing color. This is the first profile you should create
because viewing color accurately on your monitor allows for critical color decisions in the design process. If what you
see on your monitor is not representative of the actual colors in your document, you will not be able to maintain color
consistency.
Input device profiles Describe what colors an input device is capable of capturing or scanning. If your digital camera
offers a choice of profiles, Adobe recommends that you select Adobe RGB. Otherwise, use sRGB (which is the default